Czeslaw Milosz: A Californian Life

 

"Wherever I am, at whatever place on earth, I hide from people the conviction that I am not from here. It's as if I'd been sent, to extract as many colors, tastes, smells, to experience everything that is a man's share, to transpose what is felt into a magical register and carry it there, from whence I came"! 

This was a task that the Nobel Prize-winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, achieved in ample abundance. As his friend, and fellow laureate, Joseph Brodsky noted, by first and foremost producing one of the most significant bodies of poetry in the Twentieth Century that range from the metaphysics of being, through the tides of history and the flows of nature and to the intimacies of the personal, often weaving the threads of all four dimensions into bright tapestries of illumination. 

But though he might imagine himself a celestial castaway exploring earth, he was, in truth, a man from many places. Starting with an idyllic childhood in Lithuania, he went to Warsaw and had a pre-war reputation as a gifted young poet. From here, he descended into the hell of occupation, became a quixotic servant of an emergent Stalinist Poland, and diplomat in the United States before defecting into exile. First in France, separated from his family, who were trapped in America, before finally landing in California and a professorship at Berkeley.

But often, as Cynthia Haven notes in her excellent and illuminating 'Czeslaw Milosz; A Californian Life' this extended period in California before he finally returned to Poland and his death, tends to be written about as simply a time of waiting: the reluctant exile, grateful for its safety, grumpy at its location (akin somewhat to Solzhenitsyn in his encampment in Vermont growling at the failure of the West)! 

Yet, as she amply, movingly, and intelligently demonstrates, nothing could be further from the truth of things. California, loved and hated, shaped Milosz in multiple ways as he proceeded to shape America.

First, he was shaped by a landscape utterly other than any he had known - a forbidding, fragile yet beautiful place - that challenged and corrected his view of nature - at once amoral, unforgiving yet enrapturing. He was shaped by his students who lacking his historical consciousness (and historical wounds) sharpened his understanding of our relationship to memory and the past. He was gifted through collaborations with his translators, often distinguished poets in their own right, enabling him to find an audience beyond Polish speakers that led ultimately to the Nobel Prize.

He in turn shaped those poets (and his students) through encounters they often described as life-changing, he broadened out the field of Slavonic studies beyond the obvious boundaries of the Russian; and, he most evidently in his poetry invited his audience to strike the metaphysical depths, not simply inhabit the personal or social or even natural surfaces of things.  Depths that interrogated that modernity that is constantly springing anew from Californian soil. 

Haven explores all of these and more in chapters rich in novelistic description and reflective depth. 

At the same time, we receive a compassionate but honest picture of a poet who is often hidden in his homeland by being lionized. He was a man of prescient and deep insight but also of contradiction. If a man of genius is not made of consistency of view, and if the opposite of a truth is another truth, Milosz was such a man. He was unfaithful, moody, yet loving and his laughter was monumental and deep. He has left us an extraordinary body of work that not only mirrors his time but opens a window onto eternity; and, thus, our futures too. 

If you love Milosz, this book will deepen and illuminate it. If you want a faithful and hugely readable introduction to it, here is an excellent place to start.

Finally, I cannot but think of Milosz's life as grace. In the aftermath of the Warsaw Rising in 1944, Milosz finds himself, a survivor but interned by the Germans in a temporary camp. His fate is highly unpromising. A nun appears, who he has never met, and argues with the German commander, in fluent German, that Milosz is her nephew. After an hour, he is released. He never sees the nun again or finds out who she is. Simply miraculous...and haunting strange...