Politics and the poet
P.J. Kavanagh
Native Realm Czeslaw Milosz (Carcanet New Press/Sidgwick & Jackson pp. 300, £8.95) The Issa Valley Czeslaw Milosz (Carcanet New Press/Sidgwick & Jackson pp. 288, £6.95) In the 1950's Czeslaw Milosz, a Lithuanian Pole, published The Captive Mind in which he described the dilemma, which he himself experienced for years, of the artist/intellectual in a Communist country. Should he go underground (and find himself with counter-revolutionaries of the Right), or should he join the Party machine, partly agreeing with it, partly living with self-disgust? It was a marvellously intelligent and honest book, making nonsense of the cruel simplifications of the Cold War, and far too good to be welcome to either side.
In Native Realm he travels the same ground, approaching it from various angles — philosophical, historical, personal, metaphysical (he is primarily a poet) — and touches on his own partial solutions: he worked for the Party in Poland and in America, and is now Professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of California. Solutions which have caused him to be called a collaborator and a traitor (both) by bigots of both camps. One of the many virtues of his book is that it reminds us, with much accompanying proof, that nothing is as simple as that.
What is surprising, at first, is the emphasis on politics and political thought; on the 'intellectual' that the 'artist' is somehow also supposed to be. We tend to separate them; when poets do involve themselves politically they usually burn their fingers and draw back. (Wordsworth and Coleridge and the French Revolution, for example.) Henceforth they concern themselves with man, and the heart of man, rather than with the state of the Party.
Milosz belongs to a different tradition (though there are signs that he moves steadily nearer to our own) but he reminds us how impossible it would be to avoid political involvement if one was born in his part of the world. Historically threatened by both Poland and Russia, frontiers almost permanently closed, the struggle going first one way, then the other, and each swing changing everything, schools, Church, language, property — even the very shape of the fields.
'In the country, Lithuanian and some Polish were spoken . . . But all the officials . . . addressed the local population in Russian on the ground that everyone had to understand the official language . . .
'Every new child added to the several millions of subservient peoples was a child of defeat. Behind him or her stretched a past of bloody battles, desperate uprisings, gallows, deportations to Siberia, and whether the child willed it or not, all this shaped his subsequent life.' He is talking of 1911, the year of his birth.
He chronicles all the many things that have happened there since, from the inside, and also from inside himself. (At one point he wonders if it is the cells of his body, affected by history, that give him his inclination to the Left.) He never complains — this is in no sense an 'I Chose Freedom' sort of book — but his little throwaway pictures chill the blood. During the Nazi Occupation: 'One Sunday afternoon I saw a family: a man and a woman pushing a baby-buggy; the Gestapo car rolled up to them slowly. The man, seeing a revolver nozzle aimed at him, put up his hands; they thrust him into the car, and moved off to further hunting — for sport.' He knows the man will never be seen again. Such things put a gulf between those who have witnessed them and those who can only try to imagine, and Milosz tries to build a bridge.
He throws no stones at our comparatively protected lives, though he is contemptuous of some of our fine words. He moves, in his own way, towards the position of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Oppressed by his knowledge of the underside of capitalism he nevertheless experiences an illumination in the marvellous countryside of New York State. He is not easily deceived. but he does not kick at beauty and peace when he finds it, although the ills of his own territory — Treblinka, Maidenek, Auschwitz — oppress him until he is ready to declare — 'I admit it openly — that a curse hangs over this particular piece of Europe and nothing can be done about it.' The poet and the cradle-Catholic, parts of a complex man, are here allowed to speak for a moment. Historically and politically this book is a revelation — he sees everything from an angle different to ours — but is also important for the view it gives of a man who is just about as 'foreign' to us as it is possible for a fellow European to be. We lind how unlike us he is, and yet how like.
In The Issa Valley, a novel, he lets the pure descriptive writer take over. Basically, it is an account of a Lithuanian country childhood — shooting-parties, fishing, aunts and uncles, and so forth. But even here, in this distant corner of Europe, we are haunted by similarities. Where else have we read of priests and their lovers, of old aristocrats barely distinguishable (to the outsider) from peasants, of demon-haunted drunkards, of a pervading hatred of foreign masters? Then we realise how like Ireland it is, and that Milosz now knows this. His young protagonist thinks all the complexities and antagonisms by which he is surrounded are exceptional: 'Had he crossed paths with a young Englishman brought up in Ireland or with a young Swede raised in Finland, he might have found many analogies.'
This is the reproduction of the American edition, with usages sometimes hard to fathom and 'rustic' speech rendered in L'il Abner Appalachian: 'Snack time fellas, the old stomach's growling. Must be pushin' noon.' There are illiteracies, too. Apples 'smelled acrimoniously of stone and packed earth.' Perhaps it is the last twist of geography and history, of which Milosz is so sensitively conscious, that he, who has lost his nation and his language, should have to permit an occasional English blur between us and his gift.
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