| No
Bay Area writer commands more public prestige or private respect
than Czeslaw Milosz. It isn't just the Nobel Prize for literature
the Polish émigré poet and critic won in 1980. Even
before he earned that ultimate honor, I never heard anyone–no
matter what his or her literary politics–speak of Milosz with
anything less than awe.
That
enormous respect, however, is usually mixed with a large dose of
intimidation. Milosz not only seems a major literary figure, he
is also a profoundly European one. He may have spent the last forty
years in California, but his prolific work remains rooted in the
distant and turbulent history of Eastern Europe. Even his name announces
his mysterious foreign status. Pronounce his surname correctly (Mee-wash),
and even literati give you funny looks.
Born
in Czarist-controlled Lithuania in 1911, Milosz grew up in the precarious
new democratic Poland created after World War I. The young writer
soon witnessed the destruction of his two homelands and survived
both Hitler and Stalin. Meanwhile he became a leader in Poland's
"Catastrophist" school of poetry–a literary name that aptly
describes the world of his early adulthood.
If
this underground resistance member physically survived the Nazi
Occupation, he soon lost his Marxist idealism in Stalinist Poland.
He defected to the West in 1954. He lived first in Paris, but his
sensibility had been too strongly formed by modern apocalypse to
pursue art for art's sake. Milosz became the bard of history and
deconstructionist of totalitarianism–not only in verse but
in such prose classics as The Captive Mind (1953), an incisive
study of the Communist mentality. In 1960 Milosz joined the faculty
of U.C. Berkeley where he taught until he retired in 1984.
For
readers curious to discover this formidable talent, there is no
more accessible introduction than the new book, Milosz's ABC's.
The ABC is a Polish genre composed of short prose pieces alphabetically
arranged. Milosz has used the form to create an unchronological
intellectual and spiritual autobiography. Composed of sections mostly
only one or two pages long, the book moves in short lyric bursts
of memory. The tone is intimate, but the content is impressively
rich, including politics, history, literature, and religion.
Most
of Milosz's ABC's consists of concise but evocative portraits
of people the author once knew. Some are famous like novelists Albert
Camus and Arthur Koestler, but many are forgotten Polish and Lithuanian
intellectuals. Milosz's accounts of these brilliant idealists trapped
by the tragedies or absurdities of modern history make chilling
but compelling reading. (How easy and uneventful, by comparison,
are the lives of American writers!) So expressively does the author
summon up their memories that soon the reader not only shares Milosz's
interest in their lives but also feels his complex emotional attachments.
"Because
we live in time," Milosz writes, "we are subject to the law that
nothing lasts forever." Milosz's ABC's attempts to rescue
a few exemplary people, places, and events from oblivion. "My heroes
appear in a flash," the author confesses–admitting that he
could have treated his material more expansively in a novel or memoir.
But he has been true to his talent. Milosz's ABC's may be
written in expository prose, but its impact is lyrically poetic.
|
