REVIEW / BOOK
NOBEL LITERATURE WINNER SEARCHES PAST

Author: By Robert Taylor Globe Staff

Date: Wednesday, February 11, 1981
Page: ?????
Section: LIVING

It was only a few decades ago that the future winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature was hustling ladies' underwear, sausage, cigarettes and whiskey (war booty from Dunkirk) on the Warsaw black market. In this respect he was no different from his fellow citizens accumulating the bitter wisdom of slaves: "During those four years, I, and many like me, unlearned Western civilization, if what it teaches can be boiled down, more or less, to respect for money and the feeling that one has some kind of rights."

At the same time, however, Czeslaw Milosz was selling a different sort of product, his volume of poetry printed on a ditto machine and laboriously hand- sewn - the first literary work produced in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.

Today Milosz, professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of California since the early '60s, is still virtually unknown to American readers. Long before the Nobel, however, Joseph Brodsky declared him "one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest." This brilliant memoir, a trenchant addition to the 20th century's abundant literature of displacement and exile, went unnoticed here in 1968; and its resurfacing can be accounted one of the blessings of the usually baffling Nobel.

Born in Lithuania, Milosz was almost an exile from birth, his engineer father building bridges for the Russians, and then, after years of constant war, joining the Poles in the Russian-Polish War of 1919. Milosz grew up in Vilna, nostalgic for the semipagan groves of the Lithuanian landscape with its fogbound forests and rolling hills; and one of the memoir's triumphs is its evocation of Vilna's seething Eastern European world, a mixed grille of nationalities, antique hatreds and the malaise of anti-Semitism.

But this is not an intimate memoir: History rather than the self dominates, and the book's subtitle defines what happens as a search rather than a detailed remembrance of things past. Although we follow the chronological progress of Milosz through his doctrinaire Catholic upbringing - his early ties and later disillusionment with Marxism (so different for a Pole than for a Westerner); the epiphany of his discovery of Paris and the influence of his distant relative, the French-Lithuanian poet Oscar Milosz; the ordeals of the second World War with its melancholy rosters of friends and colleagues killed, tortured and imprisoned; his work as a bureaucrat and subsequently as secretary at the Polish Embassy in Washington - the book seems less a linear chronicle of events than the record of a mind contemplating the meaning of those events.

Lest this suggest a deadly air of abstraction, let it be said that "Native Realm" is lucid, graceful and not lacking a sense of the absurd. Anyone who has trudged out of as many burning cities - literally and metaphorically - as Milosz has, is not writing about light-hearted occurence, still he retains a wry detachment. Near the end, for example, his description of a Sunday night in Toledo, Ohio, all eyes riveted on the television screen, prompts the reflection that the loss of the sense of history, and therefore of a sense of the tragic, deprives even the lonely of their singular loneliness. History dominates Milosz's quest, but he is also a poet and aware that real experience, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door, persists outside the tread of time and loss.

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