Poet in Rome Talking with Czeslaw Milosz
O'Grady, Desmond
Desmond O'Grady POET IN ROME My meeting with Milosz When writing my book, The Turned Card, about Christianity in Central Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found...
...Desmond O'Grady POET IN ROME My meeting with Milosz When writing my book, The Turned Card, about Christianity in Central Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found Czes-law Milosz's 1951 classic about totalitarianism, The Captive Mind, a revelation...
...He kept rolling something between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand as we spoke of Rome, which he found unchanged, of Jerzy Turowicz, Lithuania, Poland, the United States, and John Paul II...
...That awareness inspired his writing and also a resentment against the West, which did not want to know about Gulags...
...There's an innocence to his elevated spiritual rhetoric...
...I thought we might do so at his reading...
...Because of a traffic snarl, it took me an unusually long time to reach home after the reading...
...Maritain whom we used to read long ago Would have reason to be glad...
...He was out, but I left a message that Turowicz was a mutual friend and I hoped we could meet...
...I think he would have relished the story...
...It was only as our encounter concluded that I saw what he had rolled ceaselessly in his fingers was his hearing aid...
...How can I place John Paul II when his philosophical writings, like Norwid's writings, lack the flaw that I find so necessary...
...I see our poet Cyprien Norwid as a major influence on John Paul: Norwid has some disquieting aspects...
...Through a series of profiles, Milosz showed how certain Poles had gradually accepted what he called the New Faith of Communism...
...In the pope's words and actions, a Polish reader can see at times the influence of our Romantic literature...
...I've played many pianos" was his description of his life and writing, after mentioning that he had just published an anthology exploring ethnic and other tensions in Poland in the 1920s...
...I regretted that there was not more time to talk with the amiable poet who was born of landed gentry in Czarist Russia but was educated in Lithuania when it was Polish, lived in Warsaw during the Nazi and Soviet occupations...
...Largely through case studies of four writers he called Alpha, the moralist...
...The essay was a study of "the stages by which the mind gives way to compulsions from without...
...John Paul has a profound belief in Christ acting as a providential force in history...
...Finally, I regretted I had forgotten to tell Milosz that, until 1870, when Rome ceased being a papal city, his hotel had been a brothel for clerics who reached it through a door to an adjoining restaurant that gave on to another street...
...knew people such as Camus and Einstein and, after initial revulsion, learned to like America while a professor at Berkeley...
...Gamma, the slave of history...
...He did not claim to be a friend but said that he knew the pope "fairly well...
...Not only that, the daily carried an interview with him and published his poem "Caffe Greco," about drinking with his friend, Jerzy Turowicz (1912-99), at that Roman coffee bar...
...This reservation relates to Milosz's comment that "now someone is seated on Peter's throne who was prepared by Norwid to interpret Russia's centuries-long march to the West as the process of her humanization through the martyrdom meted out by her to the Poles above all...
...At its conclusion, John Paul thanked Milosz privately for reproving German participants who considered everything east of Germany "outer darkness...
...Later I discovered these profiles were based, respectively, on Jerzy An-drzejewski (1909-83), author of Ashes and Diamonds, Tadeusz Borowski (1922-51), Jerzy Putrament (1910-66), and Kon-stanty Galczynski (1905-53)-all Polish intellectuals coopt-ed by the regime...
...But while I was with him I forgot the hotel's prehistory and, in any case, would not have been able to convey it without raising my voice...
...and Rome Reshaped (Continuum...
...It was not friendly to the West or the Industrial Revolution, seeing the mercantile civilization that emerged as undermining freedom and integrity...
...I attribute his perspicacious outlook to "endless amazement, every day," to his unblinking awareness of the Soviet Gulag that made him realize he could have died early on, as did many friends, in a prison, work camp, or mine...
...The Captive Mind led me to Milosz's other work, which made me keen to meet him...
...One morning in November 1999,1 learned in the Cornere della Sera that, to mark the publication of a Polish-Italian selection of his poems, Milosz was to give a reading that evening at the Polish Institute...
...became a diplomat of Communist Poland but defected, inspiring suspicion on both sides...
...With age and the waning of this age One learns to value wisdom, and simple goodness...
...No sooner had I arrived than Milosz returned my call and we made an appointment to meet at his hotel the following morning...
...wrote in France against totalitarianism when Jean Paul Sartre was praising it...
...Beta, the disappointed lover...
...As a result, he feels he shares a language only with those Poles who have "passed through Marxism, atheism, or some other deviations-ethnic deviations with their family, for instance, or sexual ones...
...Desmond O'Grady is an author and journalist who lives in Rome...
...I had written for Tygodnik Powszechny, the Cracow Catholic weekly edited by Turowicz, and had come to know him...
...I regretted that I did not thank him for revealing so many personal truths in his work, even though he dislikes subjective writing and claims to have an "unfavorable opinion" of himself...
...In his "Road-side Dog," he wrote, presumably about himself: "When his books gained fame and the analyses were written, no literary critic would guess that behind their philosophical meditations was the image of suffering crying to heaven for vengeance...
...In both Rome and Warsaw, victims died in solitude while people continued their daily tasks: Those dying here, the lonely Forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them the language of another planet, Until, when all is legend And many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet's words...
...I rang Milosz at his hotel...
...In fact, Milosz's deafness obstructed the whole conversation that was saved, nonetheless, by his goodwill...
...and Delta, the troubador, he portrayed the world created in the "People's Democracies" as the imaginary "Absurdistan...
...Milosz has written that he can "smell" the same dangerous innocence in virtually every single Pole...
...At the time, I did not realize that the Nobel Prize-winning poet had Rome connections and was about to renew them...
...This conviction is shared with some of our Romantics but, fortunately, he doesn't seem to believe in the nation itself being a savior-I'm deeply suspicious of those who do, because salvation is individual...
...Milosz, a Catholic who confesses that "all my intellectual impulses are religious," has dined with John Paul II several times...
...But he waved his walking stick, saying he would save his strength for a stroll with his American wife...
...On his first visit to Rome in 1937 he had gone to the market in Campo dei Fiori to see a statue of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher who had been burned to death there as a heretic...
...he was slightly bent and jowly but obviously had been handsome...
...The scene returned to his mind years later in Nazi-occupied Warsaw when he stood near a Ferris wheel full of laughing people who, as they were lifted high, caught black shreds floating up from the burning Jewish ghetto...
...I regretted that I could not learn more about his relationship with his first wife, Janka, which his writing hints became very difficult and painful during her decade-long fatal illness...
...He used a walking stick but his only serious impairment was deafness: an assistant had to pour words into his ear...
...I also discovered that Milosz regretted that he became widely known for this psychopolitical study rather than for his poetry and other books...
...I was also curious about what happened to his children who matured in America...
...He said that "Caffe Greco" was a tribute to the "wisdom and goodness" of Turowicz, whom he described as superior to his "proud and genial" companions...
...In an essay he has described a meeting of intellectuals at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo...
...It was a point of contact...
...That might have annoyed the staff of what is now a very proper establishment...
...Although eighty-eight, Milosz looked robust, with brushed-back gray hair above a high forehead...
...I did not foresee that hundreds of Poles would crowd around him at the conclusion of his talk, making it impossible to introduce myself...
...Milosz's powers of observation and analysis transformed these personalities into persuasive archetypes...
...As a result, he feels grateful "for every sunrise and every slice of bread...
...Milosz found crowded taverns and vendors shouldering baskets of food...
...When we did meet, in the hotel foyer, I suggested that we go to Piazza Navona because in the narrow streets he would see the craftsmen he liked to observe...
...His most recent books are Beyond the Empire (Crossroad) and Rome Reshaped (Continuum...
...A meeting seemed unlikely, however, because Milosz had exchanged Central Eastern Europe for Berkeley, California, while I was living in Rome...
...And for me amazement That the city of Rome stands, that we meet again, That I still exist for a moment, myself and the swallows...
...He commented concisely on his poems before reading them in a matter-of-fact manner...
...With me Milosz assessed John Paul through a literary prism...
...He also read "Campo dei Fiori," which linked Rome and Poland...
Vol. 130 • August 2003 • No. 14
