A Poet Worthy of Protest

By ROBERT PINSKY

New York Times, August 26. 2004

Cambridge, Mass.

When I heard that protesters were going to demonstrate at Czeslaw Milosz's funeral tomorrow at the Mariacki Church in Krakow, it was easy for me to imagine the great poet's laugh. The protesters do not think he was Catholic enough, or Polish enough. He raised such antagonisms all his life. As a kind of byproduct of being a great writer, devoted to ultimate things - call him an Eschatological Humanist - he drove authoritarians crazy. In the 1970's, Czeslaw knew that the Soviet authorities in Poland were beginning to rehabilitate his reputation when an official reference work alluded to him - unmistakably, though not by name - as one of several poets in his generation who were of no particular significance.

He was living in Berkeley, Calif., at the time. He shared this information with his American friends and colleagues, coloring it with his booming laugh, a deep bark of pleasure that was simultaneously hearty and ironic. The sound of it was infectious, but more precisely it was commanding. His laughter had the counter-authority of human intelligence, triumphing over the petty-minded authority of a regime.

Being a forbidden was an old story to him. He had survived the Nazi occupation of Poland, as many of his close friends did not. He survived his confrontation with the postwar Communist government, and his choice of exile. After the war, his imagination survived through decades as an émigré artist: an anomaly, a Polish poet in America. In "Magic Mountain," a poem published in 1975, he wrote: "Fame would pass me by, no tiara, no crown?" Meaning: he could survive an exile artist's fate, the likelihood that recognition would be sparse. In a poem titled "My Faithful Mother Tongue," he wrote of the Polish language: "You were my native land; I lacked any other."

Then he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, the year of Solidarity in Poland. Lines from his poems appeared on banners, and on a famous monument in Gdansk. An edition of his poems was allowed, and in a time of food shortages and short money, queues of people waiting to buy the book extended for blocks.

In Berkeley, Czeslaw sometimes showed his friends a three-panel cartoon from a Warsaw newspaper: first panel, a man walking along while reading a book, with another, sinister figure lurking around the corner; middle panel, the hidden figure leaps from the shadows to stab the walking man in the back; in the final panel, the killer walks away from the bleeding corpse, reading the stolen book, with its cover now visible: "Milosz Poems." From the poet displaying this little artifact, those characteristic barks of laughter - skeptical, but undeniably pleased.

By maintaining a stubborn loyalty to his language and his native province, he had become a world poet. By cleaving to seemingly outmoded convictions of his childhood and youth - belief in reason, love of nature, the cosmopolitan views of his uncle Oscar Milosz, an important French poet - he survived the lethal ideologies of Nazism and Soviet Communism. By tending to his work, and by the turns of fortune, he had now somehow, beyond his own expectation, outlasted the great brutal monolith and its attempts to edit him out of history.

The cosmopolitan, eclectic side of his imagination might have been formed not only by Oscar Milosz but by his childhood home city of Vilnius - then Wilno, in Polish - which was Jewish and Polish and Lithuanian, a lively intellectual center. After his triumphant return, a return that for decades seemed beyond possibility, he was honored in a Vilnius that is no longer Jewish or Polish, but altogether Lithuanian. Gradually, he left Berkeley for Krakow, a university city that unlike Warsaw survived the war with its ancient buildings intact.

His prose book "The Captive Mind" is not so much anti-Communist as an account of the traps, compromises, self-deceptions and suicidal hypocrisies of writers and intellectuals in a police state. Anyone who supposes that poets or scholars are by their nature moral guides as people will find a generous but unwavering corrective in "The Captive Mind." The book survives not only the Soviet system, but also the fall of the system.

I visited Czeslaw in a Krakow hospital last month, a day before his 93rd birthday, a couple of weeks before his death. He greeted me with a familiar mixture of courtliness and attentive self-examination: "I am very moved you have come to visit me. Fortunately, I am conscious."

As these characteristic words indicate, the spirit and mind were as ever, though the body appeared too weak for writing, maybe even for dictation. To the question, "Czeslaw, have you been composing sentences in your head? Are you writing in your mind," he responded, "Nooo" - the syllable prolonged in a crooning, Slavic way - "only absurd bric-a-brac."

The homely French phrase, so amusingly placed, demonstrated his subtle command of English, a language in which he chose to write only one poem ("To Raja Rao"). Then he chose to give an example of the bric-a-brac, a dream he had that day, in the hospital: "I dreamed I was in 18th-century Boston," he said. "Arguing with Puritans."

Then, "Everybody was in uniform!" - the old laughter booming, with its sense of absurdity and purpose, appetite and revulsion, grief and renewal: an essential sound of the 20th century, persisting in an unsurpassed body of work. The enemies of that great voice could not silence it in exile; their baffled, angry protests cannot muffle its triumph at home.

Robert Pinsky's most recent book of poems is "Jersey Rain." He was poet laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000.

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