MILOSZ' GUARDED PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

Author: By Christina Robb, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, October 16, 1987
Page: 91
Section: LIVING

"I always have a sense of being at cross purposes with my American readers, who do not quite get the point," Milosz complains near the end of this uneven book. But his life has been so strangely canted that it's hard to blame us.

Milosz has lived a life of being otherwise and otherwhere. He was raised in Lithuania, though his family spoke Polish as the language of the gentry. As a child, what amazed him about Poland was that almost everyone there spoke this, to him, exalted and genteel tongue.

Though natural science fascinated him as a boy, he opted for the humanities as a young man, but studied law (since Polish studies were for women). When he went to Paris in the '30s to ripen as a poet with and around his mystical uncle Oskar Milosz, then quite a well-known poet, he became a leftist sympathizer, though he says this left-leaning felt somehow wrong to him.

Shortly before World War II, he returned to Poland and had the luck to hide out as a janitor in the Warsaw University Library during the worst of the occupation. "I was like a mouse who found himself inside a huge cheese," he tells Czarnecka.

This book appears with no introduction. We never learn where, when and under what conditions or provisos these interviews were conducted, or how and by whom they were edited. We just turn the page, and there is Milosz, answering questions about Lithuanian Polish idioms of his chilhood and not even being asked questions about his mother, his father, his siblings (if he had any), his friends or other important personal influences.

Occasionally Milosz refuses to answer completely innocuous questions, such as what he thought of Italy on his first trip, or what people thought of the radio station he worked for when he first came back to Poland after his poetically formative years in Paris. Then about a fourth of the way through the book, the very stiff Polish literary critic, Aleksander Fiut, gives over to Ewa Czarnecka, a Polish journalist from New York who knows Milosz's poetry backward and forward, and cares passionately about understanding the man so she can understand his work better.

Milosz begins to melt. By the time Fiut takes over again briefly to discuss Milosz's poetic philosophy, Milosz is speaking lithely and bewitchingly about his life and his work and how he has made peace with the way the 20th century has pushed him around.

After the war, he joined the Polish diplomatic service, but following a trip to the United States in the early '50s, he concluded very painfully that he couldn't bear to stay in Poland as part of the Communist machine even more than he couldn't bear to leave. So he emigrated from the amazing land of his exalted and genteel and, by this time, much-beloved language and ended up teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, just in time for the '60s and the Free Speech Movement. And what can that free-for-all have meant to this un-Polanded Pole whose image of himself is of a "hermetic poet who sits home in his slippers and translates the Bible?" We don't find out here.

Milosz continued to write Polish poetry, essays, novels and translations and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Though he took the honor as a balance to the displacements of his early life, he feels the celebrity it brought him has acted as yet another uncontrollable way of giving people the wrong idea about him: In Poland he is regarded as a patriotic hero, when he knows himself as a Pole who merely "didn't disgrace myself." In academe he is regarded as a philosopher, when he knows himself as an educated and interested amateur, a poet who has wrung some philosophy from his pain.

"It's like suddenly feeling you're an alligator," Milosz tells Fiut. ''You never wanted to be an alligator, and then suddenly one day you wake up and you're an alligator, or a famous, celebrated poet. Somehow I find all that very strange."

ROBB ;10/14 NKELLY;10/16,15:24 FRIBUK