Cynthia Haven, over at The Book Haven (and fellow Milosz fanatic) asked me recently to write about having met the great man. So, what follows is an account, with my inadequate reflections:
On April 30, 1988 I attended a reading by Czeslaw
Milosz at Mount Hood Community College in Portland, Oregon. Before I pen my impressions, let me quote
what the poet himself had to say, from his printed diary of August 1987 to July
1988, The Year of the Hunter. The previous day, Milosz had a reading at Oregon State University in Corvallis:
…The
reading was difficult, the auditorium was not entirely appropriate – a lack of
direct contact. Then drinks with the
faculty. The next day, this morning,
that is, again the drive from Corvallis to Portland. Sitting
on the campus, I prepare a new program for my performance from twelve to one;
very successful, direct contact. Lunch
in a restaurant with a few people, and then they drive me to the airport.
All the time, however, I’m
divided into the person who already knows how to play the game the way they
want him to, and another person who is immersed in his own thoughts. About human society as a marvel. And about Polish themes, thanks to that issue
of Literary Notebooks.
“Direct contact” – yes, I (the divided person in the
audience) can testify, there was. A
bachelor then, working a swing-shift job at a hospital, I could drive across
Portland and attend a poetry reading (!) by a Nobel laureate on a community
college campus and then return to my “usual” life. (But, at the time, sitting in the tiered
class-room, not too big for the direct contact Milosz craved, I also thought
about the man reading his poetry and his much younger self - I had read Native Realm about a month earlier - who
had weighed his chances and escaped from Soviet-occupied Lithuania into the
Nazi Government-General of occupied Poland.)
Anyway, there was direct contact between the small
numbers huddled in the front rows and the burly man with his brief-case of
poems and his Slavic accent. Was it only
me, or was there a reason that, especially, “Magpiety,” the prose poem “Esse” (which he prefaced by calling it, both
ironically and truthfully, “a philosophical poem – profoundly philosophical”)
and the only Milosz poem I know of written first in English, “To Raja Rao,”
held his audience’s attention so firmly?
Part of the answer was revealed to to me five and a half years later,
the second time I heard Milosz read – an occasion to which I shall return.
After the reading, we repaired to another room for
the reception, such as it was. Milosz
sat at the end of a long table. I heard
him tell a questioner he thought of himself as a Polish-speaking Lithuanian,
and suddenly it was my turn in line. I
had brought my copy of his Nobel lecture.
He flipped it over to make sure of what he was signing, scribbled his
name, and I put out my hand. He looked
mildly surprised, we shook hands, and I took off like (on the most superficial
level at least) the pathetic fan-boy I was.
I continued my assiduous reading of Milosz (in
translation, of course). Precisely
because I had to read in translation I have considered that his prose has
necessarily meant more to me than his verse, despite my absolute love of many
of his poems. (I contrasted this with my
reading of Auden, to me a very comparable figure in terms of intelligence,
philosophical depth, and religious commitment: because Auden wrote in my
language his prose and verse held a rough balance for me). In January of 1989 I read The Land of Ulro and had the singular
experience of finishing a book which I then immediately began to re-read. It is my favorite of his prose works, and I
have read it perhaps a dozen times. That
autumn and winter of 1989 the Soviet imperium
collapsed and no figure came to mind more than Milosz as incarnating the decades
leading up to those events.
As they say in the movies, “the years passed.” Now it was the autumn of 1993. I was married, with a toddler daughter, and
Milosz and Robert Hass were billed as part of the Portland Arts and Lectures
series. A friend of mine (thank you,
Terry!) had access to a free ticket.
This was a very different affair.
No community college, but the Arlene
Schnitzer Concert Hall.
Not two or three dozen in attendance, but hundreds. A real reception afterwards. When Milosz and Robert Hass were introduced
and went on stage, you could see the difference five and a half years had
made. Milosz was now 82, somehow
physically diminished, and I noticed the nervous tic, for lack of a better
term, that sometimes besets the elderly, as his eyebrows (those eyebrows!) shot
up and down. When he read, his voice was softer and higher,
and his recitation more rapid. Still, we
were hardly watching a man in mental decline.
The “contact” was different than the previous reading, but still
palpable. The audience was able to write
out questions for Milosz and Hass, which the M.C. selected and interspersed
with some of his own. At some point,
Milosz remarked (this was the partial revelation I alluded to earlier) that
poetry readings took place all over America, that he had lived in France for a
decade, and that he hardly ever saw anything like that there, and that for any
one poetry reading in France, there must be fifty in the United States. I have since considered that, allowing for
the “concert-going” mentality, there must be a larger part of the audience at
poetry readings who leaven the lump than at other “cultural events” and
mysteriously make for the contact that a poet has to hope for in public. I, too, had a question, and I scribbled away,
hoping it would pass the gate-keeper on stage.
I wondered (big surprise) about translations. Why had Treatise
on Morals (from the late 40s) never been translated? Why had only part of Treatise on Poetry (written in 1956 in Paris) appeared in The Collected Poems (this would be the
late 80s edition). [One of the best
chapters in Conversations with Cseslaw Milosz is the one on
that long poem, IMHO.] Finally, only two
chapters of Milosz’s volume on Stanislaw
Brozozowski, Man
Among Scorpions (1962) had been translated and included in the book of
essays, Emperor of the Earth (1977) –
like The Land of Ulro read over and
over again. Anyway, the M.C. read only
the part about the two poetic Treatises. Did he stumble over pronouncing “Brozozowski”? All I can remember now for an answer is that
the earlier poem was written in a meter which precluded translation (as my
knowledge of prosody matches my knowledge of quantum physics, I had to take his
word for it).
The reception followed. Something to eat and drink, people greeting
one another while wondering (how? when?) to approach the poets. I was actually on one side of a table when
Milosz, beer in hand, went for something to eat. He was otherwise unattended. So, leaning forward, I began the conversation
which went something like:
“I was
the one who asked about translations.”
Pause. “About Treatise on Morals
and Treatise on Poetry.” Pause
2.0. “Also, I wondered about your book
on Brozozowski.”
Here he
corrected my pronunciation, though to my untrained ear it sounded the same, and
then asked, “You are student of Slavic languages?”
“No, and
that’s why I’m interested in translations.
I’m particularly wondering about Brozozowki.” [No correction this time, incidentally. Not worth the bother?] “I’ve read the chapter in Emperor of the Earth over and over
again. Has the whole work ever been
translated?”
“No.” This was said with a
certain resignation, I think, and then a woman came up to Milosz, telling him
how much his poetry meant to her, etc.
The poet and I exchanged a mutual nod and the conversation was over.
Well. What
does it mean to meet, however fleetingly, someone famous? Where are the borders between fandom (for
lack of better word) and the wish for direct contact (exactly the right words)
with someone whose work has meant a world (not the world, but a world shared between an author and you and, at a
remove, with that author’s other readers)?
There is nothing inherently trivial about someone’s wish to see “in the
flesh” another human being who has assumed some kind of importance in your
life, and whom you only “know” through their work and whatever images the media
offers up to you – which is why “celebrity” and the attraction to it is so
pernicious. It perverts the healthy
instinct of admiration for achievement into its infinitely inferior
parody.
What does it mean to know someone on a more
continuous basis whose work has re-directed your life’s interests? I was the relatively undistinguished student
of an unjustly
neglected historian who bent my attention toward American
history, especially the early national period.
I had several classes with him, wrote my senior thesis for him, and
would continue to visit his office after graduation. I knew I had arrived when we were discussing
another historian, and Professor Govan said to me quite casually, “X’s problem
is, he thinks he’s Thorstein
Veblen.” There I
was, 23 years of age, to his 69, so I said something trite, like, “Well, they
say it keeps you young.” Govan replied,
“X thinks it’s one of the prerogatives of genius.” Of course, we discussed more substantial
matters, like the economics of slavery, Hamilton and how there might have been
a war with France in the 1790s, and why the United States didn’t have “national”
political parties the way European countries do. A few years ago, I discovered a wonderful
link: readers of Milosz’s
ABC’s will remember his moving pages about the historian
and polymath Arthur
Quinn. Quinn
taught at the University of Oregon for a couple of years before going on to the
Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. In his forward to The Rivals, Quinn wrote,
“Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention that my understanding of this
period of American history was shaped decades ago by conversations with the
late Thomas Payne Govan, whose published work – as good as it is – gives but a
faint indication of the subtlety and passion of his historical understanding.”
Anyway, my literary “meetings” have been few. I once met Norman Mailer (whose work was
interesting, but not important to me) when he was pushing The
Fifth Estate (if you are of an age to remember that). He was personable enough, at least on that
occasion, and shorter than on television.
I met the great historian John Lukacs (whose work has been very
important to me) once in Washington, DC at a book signing, where the conversation
was even shorter than that with Milosz (“Thank you for all your books.” “Oh, you’re
very nice.”). Lukacs has often quoted
from one his masters, Johan Huizinga:
There is in our historical consciousness an
element of great importance that is best defined by the term historical
sensation. One might also call it
historical contact…This contact with the past, a contact which it is impossible
to determine or analyze completely…is one of the ways given to man to reach
beyond himself, to experience truth. The
object of this feeling is not people as individuals…It is hardly an image which
our mind forms…If it takes on a form at all this remains composite and vague:
an Ahhung [sense] of streets, houses,
as sounds and colours or people moving or being moved. There is in this manner of contact with the
past the absolute conviction of reality…The historical sensation is not the
sensation of living the past again, but of understanding the world as one does
when listening to music
I knew exactly this historical contact (at one
remove: the remove between life and death) when visiting the grave of Walker Percy at St. Joseph’s Abbey just about six months
after he died. It was a beautiful autumn
day in St. Tammany parish, such as he might have described in one of his
novels. As my wife and I walked away, a
man who looked incredibly like Shelby Foote
was walking toward the grave. Was he
visiting the grave of his old friend? It
wasn’t until we were practically on top of him, when we saw it wasn’t. Later, I thought, how many times must this
gentleman have been stopped by people saying how much they enjoyed him on Ken
Burns’ documentaries (embarrassing all parties involved)?
Several years ago, when I was avoiding work by
commenting heavily on Amy Welborn’s old Open
Book blog, the subject came up of meeting “famous people.” It caused me to reflect. I had grown up in Oregon, the son of a
Teamster business agent, and from an early age was used to seeing prominent
political people around the place, including a certain United State Senator
who was certainly a family friend and at our house any number of times. Since then, I’ve met any number of people “in
the news.” Why, to put the matter
crudely, is coming into contact with writers of a different order than with
people in “public life”? I think I see
the answer, very dimly, but damned if I could articulate it…
I read of Milosz’s death in the Washington Post on a Sunday morning in August 2004. My family was away, and I was nursing a
headache from the previous night (yes, I know) as the sunlight poured on the
dining room and I was flooded with memories of my two encounters with the man,
of having read almost everything of his translated into English, and of what I
knew of his life now come to an end. As
if in confirmation of that life’s struggles, over the next few days certain
nationalists in Poland crawled out from under the rocks, casting aspersions on
Milosz as insufficiently Polish and hence not Catholic “enough” (echoes of Native Realm) and
the Pope, dying in Rome, had to telegraph that this was not so.
Now, a decade later, I await the day when his
massive biography is translated for dullards like me…And
speaking of translations, any reader who has borne with me for this long remembers
that early on in this piece I telegraphed a punch. A full English translation of Treatise on Poetry was published in
2001, and ever since I have taken utterly unjustified credit (if only to
myself) for having planted the idea in Czeslaw Milosz’s head.
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