Look into the Abyss
Eckstein, George
NATIVE REALM: A SEARCH FOR SELF-DEFINI TION, by Czeslaw Milosz. New York: Doubleday. 300 pp. $5.95. CZESLAW MILOSZ belongs to the small group of contemporary writers who have "looked...
...NATIVE REALM: A SEARCH FOR SELF-DEFINI TION, by Czeslaw Milosz...
...and, in the underground, another bitter philosopher nicknamed "Tiger...
...He felt a new "purity in the air...
...Like many of his contemporaries in the newly independent Poland between the two world wars, the young Milosz, a Catholic, was attracted to the Left...
...Yet he keenly felt the distance between East European and Western Leftists: We Easterners...
...later, the philosopher-poet Boleslaw Micinski...
...As an autobiography this is a very unstylish, impersonal one...
...THE FATE OF ins FRIENDS, under the Nazi and the Soviet terror, does not cease to haunt him...
...He asked counsel of Albert Einstein who advised against exile...
...To the poet in Milosz the "Spirit of History" appears with a "face large as ten moons, a chain of freshly cut heads around his neck...
...His defection in 1951, at the height of the Stalinist persecutions, was brought about by a final, recognition that "Socialist Realism," the cultural strong arm of the totalitarian state, BOOKS was to the writer and artist more than the imposition of a style...
...He grew up in a part of Poland that was annexed from Lithuania, and he combined a heritage of Lithuanian peasant stock with that of small Polish gentry...
...Told very quietly, this is the story of a European generation, complicated in Poland by the exposure to the two behemoths, and by the ambiguous attitude of Poles toward the Jews, in and out of the Ghetto...
...an outrage, too, the lying and feigning of his colleagues at the Embassy...
...Like Alexander Herzen a hundred years earlier in Paris, he sees the West "dying," envisions "time with civilizations trickling through the hourglass...
...Such stories acquired added poignancy later when they reached Milosz at his desk in the Polish Embassy in the Washington of the late forties...
...The search for self-definition ends on this note of tragic knowledge and somber hope...
...They made him feel foolish at his tasks and outraged by his surroundings...
...On his hazardous journey, at the start of his underground activity, from the Russian-occupied zone through German territory to Warsaw, he stays curiously detached, almost as if in suspension...
...Toward the end of the war, his Socratic mentor "Tiger," not unlike Brecht or Sartre, allied himself with "the right camp of the future"—fully and sarcastically aware that this camp would have little use for subtle minds, but with a kind of masochistic urge to submit to "historic necessity...
...then he came to the United States...
...Still, this "voyage into his own, yet not only his own, past" is worth our attention precisely because the central problems of our time have "occupied" Milosz more directly than most of us...
...CZESLAW MILOSZ belongs to the small group of contemporary writers who have "looked into the abyss" and survived the experience, scarred but without having lost their integrity as writers and human beings...
...To "deify the force that crushes us" becomes a perverted form of saving one's dignity...
...it was a command to lie, and therefore the destruction of his integrity and creativity...
...And through the lakes and forests of Maine he recaptured the Lithuanian landscape of his youth...
...And much of what Milosz says here he has told in slightly different form in The Captive Mind and in his novel The Seizure of Power...
...In his twenties he spent some time in Paris, then the Mecca of stifled East European students...
...He now is a professor of Slavic literature at Berkeley...
...Milosz returned to Poland—only to feel like a fool for his misplaced loyalty, and to BOOKS find his moral scruples dissolved after a direct confrontation with the Stalinist nightmare...
...News of the fate of his friends, stories of torture, death, and corruption, did not end with the war...
...The complexities of Catholic doctrine as much as Hegelian dialectics produced in him early that "intoxication with the bitterness of dualism" that runs like a thread through his writing...
...When Poland was overrun and defeated, he found himself in the Russian zone of occupation...
...had to gaze into the hellsof the century...
...The immensity of events then and later "calls for dryness" in the telling, and he tries to rid himself of the romantic sentimentality prevalent in the Polish character...
...With the help of old friends in the Party he managed another assignment to Paris...
...The historical background, the social and intellectual context at all times overshadow the personal...
...Milosz writes of his visions of death and apocalypse: a killed friend's "short, fat fingers clawing at the moss in a death spasm...
...After his defection, Milosz spent 10 years in Paris...
...In this new book, fittingly subtitled A Search for Self-Definition, Milosz traces the formation of his personality and the shaping of his mind, through the years of his geographic and spiritual wanderings, to his break with the Communist regime and his exile at the age of 40...
...Now even the most personal poem translated a human situation...
...During his last years as an official of Communist Poland it became more and more difficult to smooth over with dialectics the inner conflicts between Milosz the writer and Milosz the official of a Stalinist satellite...
...An absurdity, the pile of paper work covering a letter smuggled out of a Siberian labor camp...
...His book The Captive Mind established him some 15 years ago as an articulate and sensitive analyst of this searing experience...
...There he saw much of Oscar Milosz, a distant cousin and expatriate of an older generation, who had become a French poet, well respected in a small circle of connoisseurs...
...Working for the underground, Milosz realized that "when everything is outside the law, nothing is outside it" and that the "danger [of illegal publishing] was no greater than walking down the street...
...A budding poet himself, Milosz worked for the Polish state radio until the outbreak of World War II...
...This intoxication attracts him to his various spiritual mentors: cousin Oscar Milosz in Paris, viewing the doom of a Victorian West...
...exploded the barriers between the individual and the social, between style and institution, between aestheticsand politics...
...Though an independent leftist, he served the Polish Communist regime from 1946 to 1951 as cultural attache in Washington and Paris...
...we are alwayspupils in an introductory class...
...The intellectual air here seemed to him free after the oppressive atmosphere in satellite Europe...
...Time...
...But he returned, at great risk, to German-occupied Warsaw, to work there as a writer and publisher in the "underground state" that developed in occupied Poland complete with a political spectrum from Right to Left...
...There are no boundaries to theknowledge of what is human...
...an outrage, Manhattan unscathed in 1946 "as if nothing had happened...
...The war years of underground work in Warsaw liberated his thought and his poetry...
...Milosz was born in Poland, country at the crossroads of East and West European culture and buffer between two big and—during the critical years of his life—totalitarian powers...
...once there, he made his break in good conscience...
...He felt attracted by the exceptions: Robert Lowell, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Henry Miller, and Dwight Macdonald's Politics...
...For him, America lacked a sense of history, or what is the same—a sense of the tragic...
Vol. 15 • November 1968 • No. 6
