The New Pantagruel 2.1

One of most important poets of the twentieth century, Czeslaw Milosz, died on August 14, 2004, at age 93, in his home in Cracow. Milosz’s long life spanned nearly all of the past century, and the circumstances of that life brought him in contact with the century’s most destructive currents: nationalism, authoritarian ideology, genocidal violence. Born in a village in the Lithuanian countryside, the young Milosz traveled the Russian Empire with his father, a noble officer in the army of Tsar Nicholas. He studied law at the centuries-old university in Wilno (present-day Vilnius), one of the most ethnically mixed centers of the interwar Polish republic, a space in which faiths and tongues overlapped. Indeed, the environment of Wilno, with its diversity of languages, literatures, religions, and ideas, had profound effect on Milosz, and it remained throughout his life the ideal of what Europe could be.

In a century that brought unprecedented human destruction, so many catalogues of body counts, a poet like Milosz was needed, someone who observed firsthand the turmoil of history but who also had the clarity of vision to recognize that, in the turmoil, there were matters far greater than death.

He spent most of the war years in Warsaw, contributing as a writer and editor to underground publications. Day-to-day existence under the brutal German occupation plunged Milosz into spiritual crisis; he was shaken by what the noble schemes of the modern age had wrought and edged back toward the Catholic faith of his youth. He watched the fall of the Iron Curtain from a safer distance: in Paris, he served in the embassy of the postwar Polish government. As the Stalinist empire tightened its hold on Eastern Europe, he chose to remain in the West, staying first in Paris and then, after 1960, in Berkeley. Milosz’s reputation in the West was first established with his volume The Captive Mind (1953), one of the earliest exposés of Communist oppression in Europe. Other prose works followed—rigorous essays, an autobiographical novel, a portrait of his native Lithuania, a history of Polish literature, the diary of a year of his life—but it was for his corpus of poetry, written wholly in Polish (unlike Brodsky or Nabokov, Milosz never adopted for his pen the language of his exilic home), that Milosz earned the Nobel Prize in 1980.

Milosz’s career as a poet had begun in 1931, as a law student in Wilno, with a 20-year-old’s visions of a civilization on the brink of catastrophe, a scene of “machines throbbing quicker than the heart,” of “lopped-off heads” and “cats floating on their backs,” of red banners, military trains, and the cries of children.² A decade later in Warsaw, Milosz saw this vision come to life, as he witnessed firsthand the inhumanity that consumed 20th-century Europe. His wartime poetry offers scenes of the end of the world. It was not the end that Europeans had anticipated for centuries, an end announced by thunder and trumpets. Instead, the end had come while the world tended to its business. People remained absorbed in their individual lives, oblivious to the cosmic events around them. “No believes it is happening now,” he wrote in 1944.³ Even those amidst the carnage did not understand its weight:

In his wartime writing, Milosz wrestled with the responsibility of being a poet—at the end of the world. What was his task? Was it possible to write verse that met the moral challenge of his times? “What is poetry that does not save/ Nations or people?” he asked in the poem “Dedication.”

Milosz returned to this question throughout the next five decades. Many times he repeated the lament that his duty, the duty of a poet in the 20th century, was too great a burden. In “Preparation,” published in 1984, four years after he had been awarded the Nobel, Milosz confessed his inability to write the words that the century demanded.

Barry Moser, “Jeptha’s Daughter”

In this struggle with his duty as a poet, which, for him, was as much a struggle of vocation, Milosz recognized that the proper response to the tragedies of the 20th century was not simply a matter of depicting bodies broken in violence. His poetry does speak of acts of violence with the authority and immediacy of a witness, but, more importantly, it pierces through and looks beyond the carnage of such scenes. Yes, that man, every man, bulldozed into a mass grave was the child of a woman, a boy clutching a teddy bear or a toy truck, an infant birthed in tears and conceived in a moment of delight. Milosz understood that this was the tragedy, that a mother’s beloved child would come to his end, with a crushed skull, alone at the bottom of a pit. The tragedy of his century was not the ridiculous corpse being dragged over the gravel, it was the children undisturbed by such a sight. How many times have we now seen that image, photos of boys with their own toy guns, stoic witnesses to the violence in Bosnia and Iraq, Central America and Central Africa? It has been repeated so many times in the newspaper pages of recent decades that we pass it over, ourselves numbed. But Milosz’s lines from Warsaw remind us that there is a cosmic incongruity in seeing children so inured to violence. In a century that brought unprecedented human destruction, so many catalogues of body counts, a poet like Milosz was needed, someone who observed firsthand the turmoil of history but who also had the clarity of vision to recognize that, in the turmoil, there were matters far greater than death.

In perceiving the deeper tragedies of the century past, Milosz also understood that his time had brought a definitive end to patterns of life, to human communities, to ways of thinking and understanding the world that had been passed down for centuries. He had experienced these traditions as a boy growing up in Lithuania, where he moved both in the villages of pre-modern Europe and the refined company of the aristocratic age. Like the carnage of 1944 Warsaw, the disappearance of these worlds was cause for mourning. In 1968, that most turbulent year of the postwar era, Milosz looked from Berkeley to an age extinguished by industry, war, revolution, and by his century’s expectation that man would be enthroned as God.

Here witness the sensuality of Milosz’s poetry: his longing to reveal—and preserve—the elusive details of a whole reality, of worlds existing only in fading memory. In its 1980 citation, the Swedish Academy highlighted this element of Milosz’s verse, his reveling in the simple delights of this world. He wrote as if surprised by these delights, finding in the small details of the empirical world things to be loved and cherished. But more than that, the memory or imagining of these artifacts, and their reconstruction in verse, opened a connection to, and a bulwark around, distant traditions and fellowships. In drawing to himself the reality of his past, the Academy stated, Milosz sought “a defense against the destructive forces that hold sway in the world to which we are delivered against our will.” ⁸

…according to Milosz, he—and we—are not simply the sums of these individual particulars. There is a cohesive force, which binds the varied particulars of our own, separate lives and connects us, mysteriously, with the Universal. We are created beings. We are, in Milosz’s words, “the king’s children.”

We see Milosz building this defense in “Capri,” a meditation by the then 80-year-old poet on the long span of his life, from the villages and burgs of his youth, separated from each other by days-long carriage rides, to the world of the late 20th century. “I am a child who received First Communion in Wilno and afterwards drinks cocoa served by zealous Catholic ladies,” the poem begins. “I am an old man who remembers that day in June.” The memory of that distant celebration is bright, illuminated by the “sinless, white tablecloth” and sunlight reflected on vases filled with peonies. But the darkness of the 20th century, Milosz’s century, is always just over the horizon, and it will overwhelm the joyful scenes of his youth.

Milosz the poet admits that, early in life, when his calling had been incomprehensible and the destructive forces of the century had not been recognized, he had not looked intensely enough. He had been foolish. Still, he can capture moments from the span of his life: the rumps of horses pulling carriages, huts without chimneys set deep in pine forests, the eyes of camp inmates watching the sun rise upon another day of torture. Then, he is an old man, flying from San Francisco to Rome, tended by civilized stewardesses, flying to a grand celebration, whose participants believe not in Heaven and Hell but only in proofs of the flesh, “a tumor in the breast, blood in the urine, high blood pressure.” He will soon depart this world, Milosz acknowledges. He and his age will become as phantoms. But, before he leaves, he must again face the question: What does he have to show for himself, as a poet of the 20th century?

Milosz answered the call of the Particular. As the Swedish Academy pointed out, the poet embraced the substance of everyday life, the details of concrete reality. These objects and words and faces and passing gestures, these are the stuff of lifetimes, of existence. For Milosz, the artifacts of his life were the Catholic ladies in Wilno, the huts in the Lithuanian forest, the riverside where he caught two young lovers. In the words of a Polish commentator on Milosz, the poet defined himself, in his writing, by fixing upon the “individual, momentary, and unique.”¹¹ Yet, according to Milosz, he—and we—are not simply the sums of these individual particulars. There is a cohesive force, which binds the varied particulars of our own, separate lives and connects us, mysteriously, with the Universal. We are created beings. We are, in Milosz’s words, “the king’s children.”¹² And a principal theme of Milosz’s practice of philosophy—or, more precisely, theology—in verse was his tracing of this intertwining of our created lives with the Creator, the Particular and the Universal. Milosz understood that we glimpse that Universal, that lost Reality, in seizing the experiences of our lives, in apprehending a detail of our surroundings (whether vivid or commonplace), in recognizing that to take joy in the simplicity and beauty of those things, the substance of our lives, is to discover a pinhole opening to the light of God’s Eternity.

As I read Milosz’s confession, “My Lord, I loved strawberry jam,”¹³ his beholding of a translucent apple tree from his window, his memory of parking the car by a yellow bicycle leaning against a tree, as I read his remembrances of Caffé Greco in Rome and Rue Descartes in Paris, of the long-johns he wore as a child, of Wilno during his student days, as I read these lines, I recognize his regret at being unable to recapture, to caress, these moments and faces in their complete light. I recall moments of my own life, moments in which, even as they were unfolding, I caught the hint of eternity and felt at the same time the sting of my temporal, fractured existence. This sting reminded me that despite my longing to possess a moment, it was bound to extinction. If I could be a poet, if I had the gifts of vision and voice, these are the moments I would seek to retrieve and revive from the imperfect light of memory. I would hope to linger there, in that Particular, and recapture a glimpse of the Universal.

Milosz’s struggle against the earthly law that extinguishes memory is a struggle that grips me as well, that grips all of us. I see in Milosz’s constant doubt—his fear that he had failed to look, to gather, to comprehend the particulars of his life—a universal caution. In a life that spanned the last century, the instruments of that earthly law were occupying armies, bestial violence, the tumult of exile. But in our time the instruments, despite their technologies of convenience, might be even more effective at blunting our memories, our individuality. We believe that video screens, picture phones, and e-mail serve better to preserve our particulars, our “cherished moments.” In truth, those aids cause us to fail to look intensely enough. And in that failure, we lose sight of the Particular, which, Milosz’s verse testifies, can open to the Universal.

Notes

Milosz’s Century

by Bruce Berglund

Notes