You don’t have to laurel Czesław Miłosz
Gustav Jönsson
Perhaps Polish writer Czesław Miłosz’s most unsettling poem, “Campo dei Fiori,” compares the Warsaw Ghetto to Giordano Bruno’s execution. Just as Rome’s taverns were full even before the flames had died, so Warsaw’s citizens enjoyed carnival tunes and carousels outside the Ghetto. “The bright melody drowned / the salvos from the ghetto wall, /and couples were flying / high in the cloudless sky.” He had in fact witnessed that very sight when his tram carriage stopped outside the Ghetto while the Germans were extirpating the Uprising. “The wrenching irony of the poem,” writes Eva Hoffman in her new, sensitive study On Czesław Miłosz, “comes from the spectator’s utter indifference to the tragedy unfolding in such close proximity.”
Irony, Miłosz once remarked, is the slave’s weapon. Subjugated by successive tyrannies, Miłosz knew how to wield it. Here’s another irony: those who resisted totalitarianism most bravely tended to feel guilty because they hadn’t done more, while collaborators emerged with their egos intact. Camus, who supported Miłosz in his Parisian exile, had been a courageous member of the Resistance but spoke little of it; Sartre, who had done almost nothing, strutted about as if he had behaved heroically and viewed Miłosz and other Eastern Bloc émigrés as political embarrassments. In Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Miłosz sheltered Jews from the Gestapo, but he too felt troubled by guilt expressed, as Hoffman notes, in a poem where he calls himself “among the helpers of death: / The uncircumcised.”
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It’s hard to think of a critic better suited to Miłosz than Eva Hoffman. Both Hoffman and Miłosz were born in Polish-speaking Europe but settled in the United States. Miłosz saw most of his friends killed by the Nazis; Hoffman’s family was murdered in the Holocaust, only her parents survived. She is clearly struck by the clarity of his poetry and the courage of his life. I lost count of how many times Hoffman said that she got pangs of recognition when reading Miłosz. She commends him for his sedulous work to promote Polish poetry. Noting that Kraków’s cultural status, in the post-communist era, has finally been “vindicated,” she remarks: “I, too, can occasionally still feel defensive — or proud — on behalf of my native realm.” Except, of course, that Miłosz’s sense of Polish literary pride wasn’t occasional but permanent.
His pride was never personal, however. He was modest but never falsely so — he knew he was a good poet, but no one, it seemed, noticed that in Paris. The Captive Mind, Hoffman remarks, wasn’t only a critique of collaborationist Eastern Bloc intellectuals but of Sartre’s hangers-on who, Miłosz said, reduced his social status to somewhere between that “of a pickpocket and of a swindler.” This seems to have buttressed his view of himself as a “typical Eastern European,” an oxymoron if ever there was one. He kept returning in his memoirs, Native Realm, to the fact that he “like all people from the East” had a “Western complex.”
Hoffman’s study is rather lenient. For example, is it really “surprisingly astute” of Miłosz to have noticed that police in 1960s California were racist? Could it really be said that his lament about deforestation was “certainly advanced for his time”? Hoffman tells us that Miłosz had no time for Californian hippies, but she reassures us that he would’ve “sympathized entirely with today’s concerns about climate warming” — so we can breathe easy; it’s still OK to like him. And is the following passage, in point of fact, “far-sighted enough to be, indeed, visionary”?
the heterogeneity of times; the multiplicity of times; the multiplicity of possible spaces […] everything science reveals, changing reality from a mechanism into a crystal cabinet of wonders.
This doesn’t strike me as visionary but as the kind of vague banalities that on occasion litter Miłosz’s prose.
Given Miłosz’s obvious brilliance, one shouldn’t need to strain one’s praise. Nor should it be hard to concede that not everything he penned was of the highest order. In his critical essays, he could write 10,000 words on, say, T.S. Eliot or Boris Pasternak, hardly citing a single line of their poetry. Whenever he got on the topic of religion, white noise followed. By contrast, Hoffman’s close reading is exemplary: She’s sensitive to every theme and register. Hoffman, though, is overeager to praise even some of Miłosz’s more insipid poems, like “Heavenly,” his meditation on the hereafter.
Strindberg said of Carl Linnaeus that he was a poet who happened to become a naturalist; Miłosz said of himself that he was a naturalist who happened to become a poet. He had wanted to be a botanist like Linnaeus, but he had to settle for writing some of the twentieth century’s most memorable nature poetry. His stave “Abode” pictures a cemetery after sunset: “A doe and a fawn / Are here, as every evening, to eat flowers / Which people brought for their beloved dead.” That poignant yet unsentimental image could hardly be bettered. Yet Miłosz had a weakness for the kind of Romantic style where every stanza begins with the exclamation “Oh!”
Miłosz once wrote, “Novels and essays serve but will not last. / One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.” Since I personally have no poetic talent whatsoever, I rather hope he’s wrong on that score. But Miłosz’s essays could take more weight than perhaps he thought. They have proved to be no mere ephemera. That’s partly because his polemic skills could be used either in essays or verse. “Even Dante,” he once remarked, “derived great pleasure from placing his enemies in Hell.” The more I read Miłosz, the more sure I am that Clive James was right when he said that his “poems and essays flow into each other as if they belong to the one river system.”
Ever present in Miłosz’s essays — including his imperishable critique of Stalinized Europe, The Captive Mind — is his firsthand experience of the fragility of civilization. He lived through both Nazi and Soviet occupations of Poland, and his poetry registered the terrors of each system. That’s to say, he had learned in the hardest of ways that freedom is no more “natural” to man than slavish obedience. Those who had once extolled liberty could easily be made to write panegyrics in honor of Stalin. Like Mr. Sammler in the eponymous Saul Bellow novel, he had seen the world collapse once, so he entertained the possibility that it might collapse twice. His example, however, proved that it is possible for a lone individual to refuse the collapse.
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Gustav Jönsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in London.