Seeing past the politics: remembering Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz preferred to "stand in the sun rather than under the shadow of a flag"

A FEW years ago while on a research trip to Auschwitz, I visited what soon became one of my favourite bookshops. Massolit Books, on the corner of a leafy street just outside of the Old Town of Krakow, is a warm, autumnal labyrinth, filled with inspiring texts, and the smell of strong coffee and old paper. My plan was to find a Polish writer who I could spend the afternoon reading (when in Rome, and all that), and hunch in the corner gathering a dust all of my own. The writer I chose was the Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. I have felt him close to me ever since.

Milosz, who would have been 100 this year, is nowadays regarded as the totemic Polish poet; a poet of the people, of the times, a marksman of righteousness and vocalist for the wrongs to his nation. I could not have found a writer more resonant to the focus of my trip. But, as soon became apparent reading his autobiographical Milosz’s ABC’s, he was not Polish at all, but a Lithuanian, who found himself in Nazi-occupied Warsaw when fleeing the Soviet army, where he joined the Socialist resistance. After the war, when he had been accepted by his peers as a Pole, he worked for the Polish Communist government as a foreign attaché, spending most of his time in Washington and New York. By the early Sixties he had taken up the position of professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California in Berkeley. On his death in 2004, Milosz’s funereal in Krakow, where he had gradually moved in his later years, inspired protests. Some of the Polish elite thought Milosz not Catholic enough, not Polish enough.

For all of his associations with some of the most notorious bureaucracies of the 20th Century – be it those of extreme socialism or those of academia – Milosz was conspicuous in his individualism, in his adherence to the infallible journey toward truth. Indeed, as the funereal protests suggest, this a man who was notorious in his own right. Up until his Nobel Prize in 1980 he was primarily known for his prose anti-Stalinist prose work The Captive Mind, a book which, now regarded as a masterpiece to rival Koestler or Levi, was, at the time of its publication in 1953 regarded in Socialist circles as the work of a madman. Milosz, it seemed, was the only voice speaking out against the horrors of Soviet socialism, just as he had been the first poet to publish an underground collection of verse in Nazi occupied Warsaw – a heretic and blasphemer, “because all of intellectual Paris believed in the imminent victory of the so-called socialist system and the genius of Stalin,” he writes. And decades later, as an inhabitant of Poland? “In Warsaw, too, in 1990, to say that Russian Communism was just as criminal a system as Nazism caused such a furious response that one had to suspect entire layers of unconscious attachment to the idol.”

It did not take up much of that afternoon in Massolit to come to the conclusion that Milosz was a poet of extraordinary humanity. When discussing the trappings of fame Milosz turns the conversation to thanking Homer for immortalizing the tragedies of Helen and Cassandra. When writing an essay on the subject of biology, and the influence of Darwin, he ends the article thus: “in this century (20^th) the Germans, a nation of philosophers took upon themselves quite a task: to prove in practice that our image of the human being as an animal subject to relationships of force must have consequences. They did this by building Auschwitz.”

Milosz had lived through the horrors of Czarist rule; he had lost friends in concentration camps; served a despicable Soviet master, and yet was still open to accusations that he was less than what he should have been. A simple understanding of his work, of his life, would prove that he was so much more than a simple poet of his heritage. The truth is that Milosz’s work was often too pure to taste. He was embarked upon a journey that was not hampered by the “collective convictions” that he had experienced so often in Europe. On taking US residency in the early 1960s he found himself attracted to the notions of American Buddhism rather than the Buddhism of the eastern immigrant communities. He saw in the meditations of poets such as the Gary Snyder and other Beatniks a true interest in “mindfulness”, “not antagonistic to other faiths, it does not exclude belonging at the same time to Catholicism… and it bears ecumenical fruit in theological dialogue.” As with the Beats, what Milosz was searching for in his “rebelliousness” was harmony. The connection between the academic European exile and the All-American spiritualism of the Beats could not really have been more natural. What the Beats were attempting at their essence was to come to terms with a world to which they felt no connection – mainly middle-class college boys who felt closer to the railroad than the skyscraper. Well, Milosz had experienced much more than perceived rejections. If the Beats favoured spiritualism over capitalism then the Eastern Europeans of Milosz’s era longed to embrace stability over annihilation, individual sanctity over collective convictions. “Contemplative poetry,” Milosz said, “is spirituality’s resistance to a one-dimensional world.”

It is an important contrast, I think, to place Milosz in this international context, because he was an international poet first and foremost. It has been a given for hundreds of years, from Dryden to Heaney, that a poet becomes great when transgressing the immediate landscape with which he or she is most associated. But would it be wrong to point out that whilst Dylan Thomas was mastering the villanelle, TS Eliot was declaring April the cruellest month and Roy Campbell was viciously satirising the snobbery of the Bloomsbury Group, Czeslaw Milosz was writing subversive poetry that was gnawing at the grip of some of the most terrifying regimes in the history of the world?

Milosz had understood early on – especially important to him was Baudelaire’s essays on art – “civilisation as artificiality, as make-believe and theatre.” Baudelaire, who had influenced Milosz so much by “contributing to the mythological images of the great city”, had stood on the “boundary between belief and non-belief.” To Milosz the questions of the agnostic were more significant than those of the iconoclasts who came after. All around were rabble-rousers. Milosz had seen great minds twisted, taken advantage of, by fanaticisms of all persuasions, be it right-wing Catholicism or the in “anti-Fascist” movements of the 1930s where “Koestler, Dos Passos, and George Orwell came to understand… Stalin’s double game.”

It is true that one of the things that makes Milosz a poet of greatness is not just his ability to create verse, which is an intellectual talent as much as it is spiritual endeavour, but that it also lies in his ability to bare witness. His ABC’s is a remarkable testament to those who have touched him; people of great spiritual fortitude and accomplishment. It is the melding of these two aspects – his high-art temperament with his humanism – that makes him a writer of the greatest significance. And, for me at least, the discoveries he made on his journey, the questions he asked, the truths of which he dared speak, mean that he is a writer who has proven a line runs through us all that is determined never to be defined. It may be the folly of intellectualism that tries to define it, but it is the negativity and cynicism of plutocracy that, at its most destructive, seeks to impose its own definition upon us. Milosz was a man who sought to have done with such definitions, to stand in the sun rather than under the shadow of a flag, and to offer an untainted, unbiased truth to humankind’s most factional century.