THE LAND OF ULRO
Bluestein, Gene
BOOKS Emigres THE LAND OF ULRO by Czeslaw Milosz Farrar, Straus Giroux. 287 pp. $17.95. THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS by Josef Skvorecky Alfred A. Knopf. 571 pp. $17.95. by Gene...
...His recollections, like those of Milosz, are of the old country, but his most trenchant insights are based on response to American writers...
...But we are not always as aware of the contributions made by emigres whose status in America is permanent, but who nonetheless remain deeply rooted in their ancestral cultures...
...He has always been drawn to mystical philosophies and to this day specializes in Gnosticism, "the attainment of salvation through secret knowledge...
...The loss of these traditional metaphorical mirrors, Milosz suggests, leaves us in the land of Ulro, which was William Blake's name for "that realm of spiritual pain such as is borne...
...Like Milosz, novelist Skvorecky has learned from his past that the key to the imagination is freedom and flexibility...
...Such is the case of Czeslaw Milosz, who abandoned his post as a Polish diplomat and in 1961 accepted a position as professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley...
...Born in the Lithuanian city of Wilno, then part of Poland and one of the centers of Jewish research and scholarship, Milosz has acknowledged that element in his otherwise strongly Christian heritage...
...His narrator is Danny Smiricky, a professor of American literature at Edenvale College in Toronto...
...We are "entering an age of wholesale trivialization," also characterized by what Milosz describes as "unmediated reality": The impact of immediacy in the press, film, and television, and the overwhelming tide of verbiage have destroyed the conventional art forms (like the novel) which once provided a mediating element between us and reality...
...literature...
...But the miracle of The Engineer of Human Souls is first in the amazing translation, which handles every nuance of language brilliantly...
...Each section of his work bears the title of an important writer—Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad...
...Josef Skvorecky's novel deals with the same theme, but its point of departure is Stalin's dogma that the writer is an engineer of human souls—"as an engineer constructs a machine, so must a writer construct the mind of the New Man...
...The narrative alternates between Danny's recollections of his Bohemian hometown under the Nazi and Soviet occupations and his contemporary life in Toronto...
...Czech accents, malapropisms, and colloquial English (with appropriate British diction occasionally) are all presented with admirable ease and clarity...
...Czech writer Josef Skvorecky emigrated to Canada in 1968 and is professor of English at Erindale College of the University of Toronto...
...The two often intersect in moving and humorous ways...
...Another layer of the narrative is provided by a series of letters from friends in various parts of the world, including Czechoslovakia...
...And he follows Twain in acknowledging the curing power of humor in a mean-spirited world...
...Think of Alexis de Tocqueville or Charles Dickens...
...In 1980, Milosz received the Nobel Prize for Gene Bluestein is professor of English at California State University in Fresno...
...As Milosz notes, "Behold the enduring image of a poet, ill at ease in one place, ill at ease in the other— 'always and everywhere ill at ease...
...For the emigres, this not only makes good sense, it is the definition of their status...
...even the latter's blasts have been tonic in the long run...
...But Milosz's recollections of his Polish background and his call for deliverance from a desolate mechanistic vision are poignant and worth encountering...
...The Land of Ulro consists of Milosz's speculations about the meaning of his life and especially the influence of the Polish intelligentsia upon him...
...Smiricky has tried to "second-guess life, to interpret it, to conjure it up out of fantasy"—in short, to be anything but the engineer of the human soul...
...This is not a new idea and it is presented in an often prolix style perhaps further muddled by the translation from Polish...
...This subtlety of translation is especially important because Skvorecky has layered the book with a variety of distancing devices that provide a complex structure...
...by the crippled man...
...Edenvale is Skvorecky's metaphor for the Western continent, but he does not mistake Canada or the United States for Paradise...
...Not surprisingly, one of Milosz's main themes is "the spiritual exile of modern man" and the quest for a homeland, not so much a physical place but an atmosphere conducive to answering human needs...
...He recalls Hawthorne's insight that a cold rationality is the unpardonable sin...
...We get narrator Smiricky talking to them as well as to himself, and it's clear that he deserves a better audience...
...Some of Skvorecky's best effects are the product of classroom discussions Smiricky carries on with his intellectually lethargic students...
...Skvorecky knows how to use Ernest Hemingway's best dictum: a writer needs "to understand what he really feels instead of feeling what he is supposed to feel" according to the prescribed conventions of his culture...
...Like Blake and other romantic writers, Milosz is convinced that science has cut the throat of poetry...
...by Gene Bluestein Americans have always profited from the insights provided by visitors from other lands who look at us with eyes uninfluenced by local prejudice...
...It is not science so much as its application through the narrow vision of engineers that Skvo-recky uses as his main metaphor...
...Despite frequent references to writers and philosophers unlikely to be familiar to many readers, Milosz manages to communicate a clear sense of his Polish intellectual upbringing...
Vol. 49 • March 1985 • No. 3
