ANOTHER HERO OUT OF POLAND
POET CZELSAW MILOSZ NONPERSON' NO LONGER

Author: By Carol Stocker Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, May 18, 1982
Page: ?????
Section: LIVING

Nations or people?

A connivance with official lies,

A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,

Readings for sophomore girls.

That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,

That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,

In this and only this I find salvation.- From "Dedication" by Czelsaw Milosz, Warsaw, 1945.

As Polish authorities sift through their own ranks for leadership within the Communist Party, they have been repeatedly embarrassed by the greatness of the men who do not play by their rules.

First, a cardinal from Poland - a state where religion is discouraged - became Pope. Then Party leaders were presented in 1980 with a Polish language Nobel Laureate whose works they had banned for decades and who had lived in the United States for 20 years.

"After the prize, my name was defrozen. Defrozen, yes . . ." recalled a bemused Czeslaw Milosz (pronounced CHESS-wah MEE-wash) recently in Cambridge, where he had just completed a year's appointment as Charles Eliot Norton lecturer at Harvard. "The Polish public at large had not heard my name,
because of censorship. After the Nobel Prize, the official press started to publish me." (One could almost picture the censor, with a huge meat locker of frozen art, pulling Milosz' books out of the cold onto empty supermarket shelves.)

After 30 years as an Orwellian "nonperson," Milosz visited Warsaw last June to a hero's welcome - and became a symbol of the Polish people's demand for artistic and intellectual freedom.

Long known to Poland's intelligentsia, Milosz was greeted during that Solidarity summer by workers bearing banners. The metaphysical poet from Vilna and the electrician from Gdansk established an immediate rapport. "I met Lech Walesa and we got along very well. I have a great admiration for that man. I trust him. I consider him the true leader of the country."

Few might have expected such a twist in the life of a Lithuanian-born poet who spent 20 years in obscurity, teaching Slavic literature at Berkeley, while writing in Polish.

But Milosz' life has been no ivory tower reverie - he has lived much of it in the vortex of 20th century history, spanning and observing worlds as disparate as the Warsaw Ghetto and the California beach culture.

He was born 71 years ago into a Polish-speaking Lithuanian village. His father was an engineer, his family gentry, and he was raised in a preindustrial society populated by peasants and landowners, where nature, religious superstitions and local legends nurtured the boy's imagination. After receiving a classical Catholic education in the nearby city of Vilna, Milosz dabbled in socialism, embraced poetry and went off to study in Paris. There he was greatly influenced by his uncle, Oscar Milosz, a noted poet who shared his distrust of modernity and had intuitions of oncoming disaster.

After being fired from his job at a Vilna radio station for associating with Jews, Milosz arrived in Warsaw in 1937, did more radio work and joined a circle of poets called the Catastrophists because of their prophecies of doom.

Catastrophe did strike. The Nazis took over Poland while the Soviets grabbed Lithuania. Milosz had his choice between two different dictators. He threw in his lot with the Poles, figuring there was a better chance of dislodging the Nazis. Milosz worked with the Polish resistance and became especially active in the literary underground. He wrote many of his most compelling poems as a witness to events in the eye of the Holocaust.

After the Communist takeover, Milosz went to work for the new government, spending four years as a cultural attache at the Polish Embassy in Washington. "I entered the service of Poland in the time still of the coalition government. Certain appearances were kept for a few years. I left the government as a logical consequence of the end of the coalition government, of other parties being swallowed by the Communist Party." In 1951, Milosz eased into exile through a post in the Polish Embassy in Paris where he remained for 10 years. But he was chagrined by the enchantment many Paris intellectuals felt for Marxism. In 1960 he left Europe for the ends of the earth - a teaching post at Berkeley - where he has remained ever since with his wife and two sons.

He has since become a naturalized citizen of the United States, which he has rather fondly described as "a great republic, moderately corrupt."

But as a fully formed artist, he has resisted Americanization. In an almost perverse way, he has settled in that part of America which would seem most alien to his own values. A poet who calls himself "a man of one or two streets" and writes about "the bonds of civitas," he lives in the lotus land of hot tubs and roller rinks where neighborhoods, friends and marriages are most easily discarded.

"I like Boston. It is more European than California, with more happening culturally," he observed. "Maybe here on the East Coast I would feel more at home. But maybe the reason I was writing in California was that it gave me a perfect feeling of estrangement and isolation. Maybe precisely that feeling of being not at home is part of being alive in the 20th century."

The consummate artist-in-exile, reviewing the events of his life over the distance of both time and space, he has only haphazardly bothered to get his work translated until recent years. He seems mildly surprised to find young American audiences reading and understanding his poems. (He spoke at Dartmouth recently.)

His intended audience has been young Poles, mostly students on short trips to the West, who convened in Paris for his annual poetry readings there, he said. Some read his books in the underground Polish press. Some even helped publish them. Together they conspired to perpetuate a culture-in-exile.

When Milosz visited Warsaw last June, he was invited to meet with the young printers and publishers of the clandestine presses. "It was a very moving and emotional meeting. I came to an apartment in Warsaw and saw some 50 young people sitting on the floor to meet an author whom they had published and distributed in danger. Some of them are sitting in prison for this now," the poet said.

Milosz has the look of a great teacher. There is no self-consciousness. The penetrating blue eyes, set above high Slavic cheekbones, have the sharp hard focus of someone whose interest is in the external world, not internal angst. Bushy eyebrows contribute to a hint of fierceness.

Although the Polish regime still is going ahead with plans to publish more of his work, Milosz is not impressed. "This is an attempt to create certain appearances. Some sort of innocuous concessions to the public appearance - probably. Because there is no question of publishing my writing which might cause a political - stink," he said, pointing out a passage in his Nobel lecture about Hitler and Stalin's nonaggression pact, which was deleted in Communist reprints.

"The situation remains profoundly inauthentic. Inauthentic. Yes. By which I mean that the last decades saw a constant creation of appearances . . . a
phony world, a very strange play of shadows on the wall. Where a parliament is not a parliament. Where a Polish army is not quite a Polish army." Milosz laughed. "Where everything is a pretend world. The movement of Solidarity was basically an attempt to recover authenticity . . . "And I should say that art of any kind, including poetry, doesn't live very well in the world of appearances. Because basic striving of a good artist is truth. I do not want to maintain that an artist in this country sees the truth . . . clearly," he said, pausing as he pursued his thoughts and the precise words that would convey them. "He is often surrounded by a cloud, chiaroscuro - a lot of indefinite shapes and it's very difficult to have a grasp of reality."

The very thought of California makes Milosz laugh with amazement. "California is a very peculiar place on this planet," he added. "But I have written a book on the world seen from California, Visions from the San Francisco Bay,' translated by a student of mine, Richard Lourie of Newton. We had an opportunity to go through the translation together while I was here at Harvard. We've been working together for many years. He appeared in my class in Berkeley, and since has been doing a lot of translations from Polish and Russian. He's a writer on his own, translator, and producer. He made the film "Dreamland" about New Orleans."

" Visions from San Francisco Bay' is," said Milosz, "a kind of philosophical meditation on the 20th century as incarnated in California.
Because I lived through a very strange period of the 1960s in California. All the crazy drugs and the flower children and the peace movement."

Milosz separates each syllable as he speaks; innocent of the usual contractions and slurs of English as a native tongue, he stretches words out to their full length. A musical cadence rises and falls as Milosz speaks, like a man enjoying a leisurely stroll through the hills and valleys of language.

"Irreality in Poland is institutionalized irreality, created by definite political goals. In California, irreality is not the result of anybody's planned action. It appears by itself. However, I had many problems coming from mideastern Europe. I had problems with young people who had never been in any other surroundings and had no possiblity of comparing. A young fool in Sacramento once asked me what is the difference between Sacramento and a concentration camp . . ." Milosz uses the term "fool" with the quiet matter- of-factness of one applying a generic label.

Milosz has lived with apocalyptic visions for so long that he is not overly impressed by today's fear of the arms race. "The situation in Nazi- occupied Warsaw called for keeping in mind what Martin Luther said when asked what he would do if he were sure the end of the world was due. He said: Plant apple trees.

"We in the Catastrophe School had the premonition of something horrible approaching. We were right as to our premonitions, but the world still exists.

"I am not an optimist. But I am not afraid of catastrophe in the forms of bombs falling and nuclear weapons. I think that the dangers which face us are much more subtle. I'm afraid of totalitarianism on a planetary scale. There is currently a competition between two totalitarian systems, the Marxists and the juntas." Milosz laughed his rich and distant laugh. "And in Poland, we have them both! "

STOCKE;05/13,11:02 MFEENE;05/19,12 B07823351