THE WORLDS WITHIN
IN A REMARKABLE MEMOIR, CZESLAW MILOSZ USES ONE YEAR AS A PRISM FOR HIS RICH
INNER LIFE

Author: By Robert Taylor

Date: Sunday, August 28, 1994
Page: 62
Section: BOOKS

"It appears that we are probably witnesses and participants in an era of revolutionary change, which is the equivalent of the transition from paganism to Christianity under the Roman Empire," he declares. "In academic circles the number of people who profess a Christian faith is small; my students display ignorance of even the simplest concepts deriving from biblical tradition, and indifference and even enmity toward religion. The scientific world is secular and it mainly professes a secular humanism, along with, for variety, the dreams of socialist terror that from time to time visit the
freethinking graduates of libraries and laboratories."

The motif of the rising tide of nihilism, however -- and he is by no means a member of the religious right -- is only one of the major themes of Milosz's remarkable intellectual autobiography. It is, in part, a memoir, and derives its title from two sources: a hunting calendar by Korsak, who wrote novels for young readers about the fauna of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania; and a poem by Robinson Jeffers titled "Love the Wild Swan," about the poet's effort to capture in words the glory of the visible world. So, in this regard, Milosz is recording the 77th year of his life from August 1987 to August 1988 both as a chronological sequence of events and as a counterpoint of memory, emotion, allegory, fable, "unending amazement" and the compelling spectacle of a first-rate mind contemplating itself.

Milosz is Lithuanian, but his father, an engineer, moved his family to Poland after the First World War. The ethnic atmosphere of Wilno, "the Jerusalem of the North," notable as the hometown of the Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade, influenced Milosz's childhood. He was 8 when Polish uhlans drove out the Bolsheviks. "Polish Wilno rejoiced; although there were other Wilnos, too: Russian- and Yiddish-speaking." Then the front shifted; with it came the first of many flights. "Father retreated with his regiment. Mother returned to Lithuania through the Vievis forest with me, my brother, his nurse, Antosia, and a goat."

A student responsive to the prevailing mood of the time, he was Marxist- oriented, and began to write poetry seriously during a 1934 stay in Paris. Later he worked for Polish radio and resistance publications in wartime Warsaw. When the war ended, he joined the Polish diplomatic corps in Paris; but following the suppression of the coalition government in 1951, he broke with the regime, and since 1961 he has been a professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

By coincidence, I opened "The Year of the Hunter" on the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising. The 63-day insurrection erupted Aug. 1, 1944; Poland's allies were far away, while Stalin stalled the advance of the Soviet army, let the Germans do his dirty work for him, and eliminated 200,000 rebels, a potential obstacle to his projected puppet state. As Milosz points out, there was a difference between the Nazi occupation of France, which, despite its horrors, still retained a residue of respect for French civilization; and of Eastern Europe, where the Germans considered the population subhuman. After the war, Stalin annihilated the anti-Nazi underground of the Polish Home Army, also a troublesome factor, for in 1945, "Poland could exist in the shape given it and guaranteed by the Soviet Union, or it could cease to exist."

Milosz's poetry expresses the tragedies of contemporary Polish history. Yet in poetry and prose he brings to life the mentality of prewar Poland with its romantic idealism, religious frictions and thriving literary culture, ranging
from the patrician irreverence of Gombrowicz to the polished strophes of Oscar Milosz, the cousin of Czeslaw, who was really a French poet with Lithuanian origins. To be sure, the general reader will confront at first a maze of unfamiliar Polish names. A biographical glossary is provided and is, alas, inadequate. The important Skamander literary group, for example, figures prominently in the text, but doesn't qualify for the glossary.

Fortunately, this will matter only to the specialist. Milosz's portraits of his contemporaries, vivid and idiosyncratic, bring their temperaments into sharp focus. There is the swashbuckling journalist and man of letters Ksawery Pruszynski, who, in 1950, driving across Germany alone at night, collided with a truck and died instantly -- probably sabotaged on orders from Polish Communists. There is the novelist and poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, who wrote limpid musical poems and was haunted by the myth of the great writer, an image of himself as a Nobel laureate. There is Leon Schiller, a legendary personage in the history of the Polish theater, seated at a piano and singing cabaret songs. Above all, there is Milosz himself, coping with the universal question, what has my life meant?

"Every man is the home of many personalities that dwell within him potentially," he reflects, "that are never realized, because only one of them appears on the outside and proffers the mask that is accepted by others." Early on, we see Milosz in the company of Pope John Paul II (with an interesting commentary on John Paul's literary influences), but we also see Milosz as a refugee, survivor, poet and, surprisingly, drinker. (He confesses that alcohol has been a source of energy for him.) The trajectory of his year arcs between eras; readings and panels on the academic circuit in the present recall the perils of Polish literary salons where an indiscreet remark might lead to the gulag. He condemns foreign correspondent Harrison Salisbury for attributing the Katyn massacre to the Germans, and bemusedly hears the jejune sentiments of a campus hothead during the Berkeley Free Speech misrule of Mario Savio and company.

One wonders how Milosz's pages might read had he selected 1989 instead of 1987. Still, it is not the tumult of time here, but the poetry and the inner life that really matter. The memoir ends with a cinema of memory, a moving scene of a Nativity play staged in occupied Warsaw and performed by poor girls of the streets. The transformation onstage of the actress playing the Madonna, who had only recently sold herself to a German soldier for a couple of zlotys, celebrated the human plasticity "which makes it possible for every man and every woman to bear within himself or herself an entire range of experiences or aptitudes, from the highest virtue to common evil." Or as Jeffers puts it:

-- This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.

Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,

Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.

Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self? At least

Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can

Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

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