Unconquerable Miłosz

It is already twenty-one years since the death of Czesław Miłosz, yet his presence in the United States, the country of his exile, is well alive. We are lucky to have no less than three new books about his life and works. The books are written by American authors, though one, Eva Hoffman, was born in Poland; the second, Peter Dale Scott, lives in the United States but is Canadian; and the third is Californian, that is, not a typical American (if a “typical American” exists at all). The books are very different: each approaches Miłosz in its own way, but they all prove that he circulates in the American literary bloodstream. Peter Dale Scott is the only poet among the authors; Eva Hoffman is a novelist, Cynthia Haven an essayist, and all three are highly respected writers. They are cosmopolitan, move between cultures, “translate” the poet into the world of English. Their books are erudite yet intimate, and they make Miłosz very accessible. They show the poet from the American perspective. Cynthia Haven even “makes” him into a Californian. They show what he took out of American culture and how he changed it.I will start with the work of Peter Dale Scott, since, among the authors of these books, he was the first to meet and work with the poet. He assisted Miłosz in the 1960s at Berkeley, translating Polish poetry into English with him. He contributed to one of the most influential poetic books of the American twentieth century—the 1965 anthology of Polish poetry published in the United States Postwar Polish Poetry, edited and translated by Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott (still in print!). There are testimonies that the anthology made many American poets and critics discover a literary tradition that influenced their writings. Scott also helped with the preparation of the monumental History of Polish Literature, written by Miłosz.Peter Dale Scott's book bears the title Ecstatic Pessimist: Czesław Miłosz, Poet of Catastrophe and Hope and is the result of many years of thorough and dedicated thinking and writing about Miłosz. Its chapters address several topics in the literary production and life of the poet. It also contains a personal history of their relations, becoming testimony, memoir, and cultural history. Alone among the three books, it also offers deep literary analysis of some of Miłosz's poems. In its annexes, Scott attaches his own “Three Poems about Czesław Miłosz.”The book has a real depth: Miłosz was one of the most important people in Scott's intellectual life. The young Canadian drifted away from the exiled poet with the eruption of student movement at Berkeley, but Miłosz's influence on him grew with time. I especially appreciated Scott's understanding of the marks that two world wars—the first one experienced in childhood—left on Miłosz. His comparative reading of the famous Holocaust poems “Campo de’ Fiori,” where the poet is a witness, and “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” as a poem of theological doubt, is truly important. His sentence, “The development towards the self-questioning that is simultaneously a questioning of the speaker's guilty civilization,” that is, of Christianity itself (pp. 72–74) is revelatory. His showing of the uses Miłosz makes of Eliot's “The Waste Land” in his late war poems was also a revelation to me. All throughout the book there is page after page of unusual insight.Some chapters of the book were written several years ago; gradually the opinions of the author have evolved, and the differences between him and Miłosz softened. This is one of the reasons why the sixty pages of endnotes in his book are particularly interesting. There the reader can see Scott's sources, erudition, and the development of his thinking. He comments on how he learned to accept in Miłosz what he previously rejected. The book is a testimony of a lifelong process of reading, absorbing, and meditating on the poet's extraordinary life and work.The work by Eva Hoffman, On Czesław Miłosz, is also very personal. It is published by Princeton University Press in the series “Writers on Writers,” which presents the work of one writer from another writer's perspective. Eva Hoffman speaks in the first person about Miłosz's poetry, prose, and life choices. She herself is an exile, though she was a teenager when her family brought her to the U.S. As she mentions in her book, she was brought up Polish (Polish and Jewish), and her immersion in her native Polish culture is clearly visible in her attention to history. Being a novel writer, she appreciates very deeply the autobiographical character of Miłosz's writings. She therefore uses his poetry and prose to talk about his life choices. Her book is a very well-written short biography of the poet painted against the background of history. We move through Miłosz's life chronologically, learning about it often from his own words.The background of history is for Eva Hoffman also personal, and, though born after the war, she feels almost contemporary to the poet, even though he is thirty-five years older than her: the generation born right after World War II inherited the war as if it were their lived experience. She also shares with Miłosz the experience of exile and understands well his feeling of estrangement. Several times in the book she compares their fates, always with the understanding that her travails were only an echo of his. But most of all, she elegantly presents his life. We can therefore read about Miłosz's childhood and youth, wartime, short postwar diplomatic work in the U.S., the 1951 escape to the West and life in France and California. She ends, logically, with his stay in Kraków—his return, though he lived in the city only for a short time right after the war. All of this is interwoven with wonderful quotations.Though admiring, Hoffman is sometimes quite severe toward the poet. It is particularly visible in her opinions about the distance Miłosz kept during World War II from the anti-Nazi underground. “Miłosz's autobiographical account of the war years,” she writes, “although I feel acutely that I have no right to pass judgment on it—is the one instance in his vast oeuvre in which I find his determination to retain his distance from events excessive, and not entirely convincing” (pp. 47–48). But a few pages later she quotes a poem that shows the depth of Miłosz's desperation when faced with war's destruction. And she concludes that his detachment may come not from indifference, but from the intensity of feelings.The topic of Miłosz's war decisions and poetry have often caused controversy. His nonparticipation in the Warsaw Uprising and his poems “Campo de’ Fiori” and “Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” were criticized and debated. None of the three authors takes a negative stand toward him—they are, after all, in America and don't have to participate in this fight. But all three sense Miłosz's unconventional attitude, which leaves some trace in their writings as well.The originality of Cynthia Haven's book lies in its focus on the American part of Miłosz's life. She defends California against numerous complaints uttered by the poet, who was bitter about living at “the end of the world,” separated from his Polish readership and from the European intellectual and cultural cross-fertilization. She underlines that Miłosz's American exile saved him from suffering in Stalinist Poland and left him free to write and produce his best poetry. She shows how the poet gradually absorbs California's landscape into his poetry, how his “I am here” from his book Visions of San Francisco Bay turns into acceptance. She even goes so far (following Robert Hass, it seems) as to consider Miłosz's stay in California as causing his poetic breakthrough, which consisted in abandoning the “bardic” tradition that characterizes Polish poetry. Scott thinks that such a breakthrough happened in 1943 in Warsaw, and, I think, this is what causes Hoffman's diffidence toward his “distancing himself.”In Haven's book we also have a series of portraits of people who worked with Miłosz in the U.S., including Peter Dale Scott, and conversations with some of them (Robert Hass, Lillian Vallee, Mark Danner, et al.). We learn a lot about the difficulties of his emigration and his (changing) attitude towards the “mores and manners” of the United States. There is also some interesting gossip, though so distant in the past that it is simply transformed into pieces of information.Her “defense” of California is very warm. And she is generally right: Miłosz turned his exile into a very productive part of his life. The influence of American poetry is visible in his work, though this process too started during the war. And he did write many of his best poems in his Grizzly Peak home. Haven beautifully describes that house, shows us Miłosz's interest in not only California's nature, but also California's history. In Polish literature about Miłosz, California is a place of his solitude. Her book shows Miłosz at work, Miłosz absorbing the new, Miłosz experimenting with different tones in his poetry, preparing new generations of translators. This image of his exile will be very illuminating for the Polish reader as the book has been already published in Poland.Miłosz is like a continent, to quote Jan Błoński, unconquerable. He wrote more than any contemporary Polish writer, excelled not only in poetry, but also in prose and essays, produced literary criticism and history, book reviews, news columns, memoirs, letters. He was interested in theology and philosophy, and was a naturalist. I doubt anyone has read all his oeuvre. What unites these three books is their honest effort to capture their object of analysis. How difficult and perhaps impossible it is we can see by their use of terms to characterize Miłosz: congenial doubleness (Scott), ambivalence (Hoffman), the man of contradictions (Haven). The books under review do their best to encompass these riches. And do it very well.

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