Czeslaw Milosz and the deep vein of loss

In the early 1990s I heard Czeslaw Milosz read his poetry in Berkeley.  He had hair combed straight back, wide forehead, high cheekbones, insect-feeler eyebrows, deeply furrowed face, sharp nose, grim mouth and wolfish expression.  After three decades in America he still had a very heavy Polish accent, read haltingly and was difficult to understand.  He signed two books for me with a pen running out of ink and his name ends pressed into the paper.

Like Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), born in the Polish Ukraine, Milosz (1911-2004) was born in Polish Lithuania.  Both grew up in what was then  the Russian Empire and were subjects of the czar.  The distinctive local society in these countries consisted of Russian civil servants, Polish-Catholic landowning nobility (to which they both belonged), Jewish merchants and rural peasants.  Conrad always wrote in English, Milosz in Polish.  Separated from his native land, but passionately attached to its language and culture, Milosz insisted: “I was not born in Poland, I was not brought up in Poland, I do not live in Poland, but I write in Polish.”  He translated books of the Old Testament and Eliot’s The Waste Land into Polish and was multilingual in Lithuanian, Russian, French, English, Greek, Latin and Hebrew.

A major theme in both authors is loss: of landscape, family and freedom.  Milosz tried to harden himself against his deep sense of loss and also, paradoxically, attempted to revive in his poetry the memories of what he had lost.  When immersed in the solace of nature or the oblivion of alcohol, he could occasionally forget the evils he had suffered.  But he could never forget that loss: “My generation was lost.  Cities too.  And nations.”  As Elizabeth Bishop wrote of personal loss in her brilliant stoical poem “One Art”:

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. . . .

The art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it might look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Conrad hated his Russian oppressors and satirized them in his political novels The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes.  Milosz admired, taught and wrote about Dostoyevsky, whom Conrad called “convulsed and terror-haunted.”  Recalling that Conrad had spent his childhood in political exile with his revolutionary parents in arctic Russia, Milosz observed: “I understood why the very young Conrad fled from the graves and heavy atmosphere induced by signs of national martyrdom.”  The destiny of both authors, Milosz wrote, evoking Conrad’s famous title, “was to descend into the ‘heart of darkness’.”

Conrad died before the Holocaust, but had witnessed government-sponsored, Cossack-driven pogroms in his native Berdichev.  Eva Hoffman writes in On Czeslaw Milosz (Princeton University Press, 2023) that in the 1930s “Poland had the largest Jewish population of any country in Europe and the largest percentage of Jewish inhabitants in the world.”  With the active collaboration of Poles, the Nazis murdered three million Jews in their blood-soaked country: 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population.

In one of his best poems, “Campo de’ Fiori” (1943), Milosz compares the Germans’ firing shots during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of that year, in which virtually the entire Jewish community perished, to the burning at the stake for blasphemy and heresy of the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno in that Roman square in 1600.  In both cases, as in W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the other non-Jewish citizens are completely indifferent to the tragedy taking place right next to them. But their turn came a year later. In the summer of 1944, as the Soviet armies watched, a second Warsaw Uprising took place: bigger but no less doomed, it led to the total destruction of the city and the death or deportation of its remaining inhabitants. Milosz helped Jews to survive in wartime Poland and was honoured in Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Gentile.  In “Dedication” he expressed his own survivor’s guilt:

You whom I could not save

Listen to me.

Try to understand this simple speech as I

would be ashamed of another.

I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.

I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

Milosz made two political misjudgments about the war.  He felt “outraged by the West’s failure to come to Poland’s aid in World War II”, though in fact Britain and France honoured their treaties with Poland and immediately declared war when the Nazis invaded that country.  He also thought the 1944 Warsaw Uprising was a “blameworthy, lightheaded enterprise”.  Though the Poles were betrayed by Stalin, who waited on the banks of the Vistula until they were massacred and the communists could take control of the country, their act of resistance had a lasting impact. And the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the most significant act of Jewish heroism in the entire war.

In Milosz’s best-known book The Captive Mind (1953), which describes the disastrous effects of communism on artists and intellectuals, he observes that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four also fascinates these communist officials “through his insight into details they know well.  Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.”

Milosz, like Conrad, felt the deep scars of his nation and believed “the only memory is the memory of wounds”, of thoughts, as Wordsworth wrote, “that do often lie too deep for tears.”  Yet he was not entirely pessimistic, and the nonagenarian  could rightly boast, “I’ve outlasted you, my enemies!”  Eva Hoffman notes that his poetry contains “sensuous vividness with austere cerebral music.”  He could also be hedonistic when celebrating “Wine with a view of boats rocking in a cove,” and lustful, when the rocking arouses recollections of the “Nakedness of women on the beach, / coppery cones of their breasts.”

In 1951 Milosz fled from his position in the Polish diplomatic corps and was granted political asylum in France, but he had a hard time supporting his family there.  He was rescued from poverty by becoming a Visiting Lecturer in the Slavic Department at Berkeley.  Though he had no doctorate, teaching experience or scholarly articles, within eight months he was promoted to a full professorship.  He never quite adjusted to the ambience of Berkeley and emphasised “the nuclear laboratories glowing among the eucalyptus trees.”  He disliked the Free Speech Movement that began in 1963, and failed to separate its political ideals from its fascination with drugs, mysticism and Eastern religions that “turned against Western man’s fondness for intellectual precision.”  He concluded, “For years I could not accept / the place I was in. / I felt I should be somewhere else.”  His sense of alienation was greatly eased when he was awarded the Nobel Prize and vaulted from relative obscurity to fame in 1980, the same year—significantly—that the Solidarity Movement began in Poland.

Milosz also suffered personal losses.  His first wife, Janina, had cancer of the spine, was confined to her wheelchair and bed for the last ten years of her life, and died in 1986.  He wrote of his guilt and loss in his confessional elegy: “I loved her, without knowing who she really was. / I inflicted pain on her, chasing my illusion. / I betrayed her with women, though faithful to her only.”  In 1992 he married his second wife, the American Carol Thigpen, 33 years younger than him, who also died of cancer in 2002.  His younger son Piotr had a complete mental breakdown in 1998.

Eva Hoffman, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor, frequently takes centre stage in her short book On Czeslaw Milosz and, like an unwanted guest, talks about herself instead of her famous subject: “I felt during the long 1960s, when I was a graduate student at Harvard…,” “I should reveal that I ended my first book…,” “To continue for a moment in a confessional vein…”  It’s also worth noting two errors: Poland ceased to exist as a country for 123 (not 150) years, and the name of Milosz’s American translator Robert Hass is misspelled four times in the Works Cited.  Despite some banal comments (“He was opposed to all sentimentality and excess,” “He wanted meaning, and he wanted truth,”) her discussion of his work is perceptive.  But Milosz poured out too much poetry, didn’t revise enough, produced many flat lines and few memorable ones.

Milosz wrote in his elegy of Carol: “Lyric poets / Usually have—as he knew—cold hearts. / It is like a condition.  Perfection in art / Is given in exchange for such an affliction.”  This idea echoes Yeats’ belief in “The Choice”: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / perfection of the life or of the work.”  Milosz chose art over life but emerges from this book as an idealistic man.

Jeffrey Meyers will publish both James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Hitler to Arbus and Plath with Louisiana State University Press in 2024.

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