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As seats fill up in the wood-paneled Morrison Reading Room of Doe Library, students climb to the mezzanine level, draping themselves between the balustrades like pensive, latter-day gargoyles. Below, journalists and photographers buzz like flies among the crowd, which chatters incessantly. The mood feels more like a gala theater premiere than a noon poetry reading. In the commotion, no one seems to notice as the star of the day, Czeslaw Milosz, Berkeley’s only Nobel laureate in the humanities, enters. He’s dressed as quietly as his entrance, wearing a dark corduroy jacket with a maroon tie and puckered pocket square. His oxblood satchel contains his poems, computer-printed in oversized type to be easy on the eyes of the 89-year-old Polish poet. He moves slowly and decisively, with a cane. Milosz’s face is softer, paler, rounder than it appears in the photos that have made his face a literary icon, though the trademark bushy eyebrows still give him a slightly forbidding look. Robert Hass, a fellow Berkeley professor and poet and former U.S. poet laureate, stands to give an introduction. Milosz, says Hass, “has been making poems for 70 years out of some of the worst horrors and ideological battles of the 20th century.” When Milosz arrived at Berkeley four decades ago, he was comparatively unknown. His work had been banned in Poland, and few knew him here. “He looked out over the alien landscape of the Golden Gate, trying ferociously to describe what it’s been like to live in the 20th century,” says Haas. Milosz’s reading is simple and straightforward, but his asides between poems are sobering: “1943 was the most atrocious year of destruction—the year of the Polish ghetto,” he murmurs before a war poem. Before reciting a poem about his birthplace, which he revisited only after a half-century abroad, he explains that so many familiar to him “had emigrated or been murdered.” Following the brief reading, Milosz is mobbed by people eager to shake his hand, express appreciation, and have their books signed. “How do you think the reading went?” a reporter queries, about a foot from Milosz’s face. “That’s for you to judge,” the poet replies. The reporter, pleased, writes this down. The room is full of Polish speakers, who crowd around Milosz. One, almost incoherent with excitement, babbles his appreciation on his knees before Milosz as his book is signed. A tall Polish man, his eyes wet with emotion, wrings his jacket in hands, trying to contain his amazement and utter disbelief at being there, right in front of Milosz. The reporter by this time has cornered Milosz’s wife, Carol Thigpen Milosz, a former dean at Emory University, who struggles to describe Milosz’s reception in Poland: “a national hero…like a rock star…another world.” Several days after last winter’s reading, in the seclusion offered by ivy and trees at Milosz’s home on Grizzly Peak, the carnival atmosphere of the reading seems strangely remote. In this rare interview, Milosz reflects on his celebrity. “In America,” he says, “I am less a celebrity because there are so many Nobel laureates. In fact, one of them sent me a letter that said, ‘Welcome to the Club.’ In Poland, I am a celebrity because of the Nobel Prize. I was the first there to receive one.” His award came in 1980, just after the first Polish pope was elected, and about the same time that the birth of Solidarity made Lech Walesa a national hero. Three timely miracles for the Polish people. But Czeslaw Milosz is not, in fact, Polish. He was born in the charming, ancient Lithuanian town of Vilnius, part of a grand duchy on the fringes of the pre-revolutionary Russian empire. The gentry spoke Polish, and the peasants Lithuanian (with a smattering of Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian). In 1937, after a stint in Paris, the young poet moved to Warsaw. During World War II, he joined the socialist resistance to Nazi-occupied Warsaw and, via an underground press, published an anthology of anti-Nazi poetry. After the war, he served as a Polish diplomat, working first in the New York consulate and then in Washington, D.C. as cultural attaché. “The political situation changed when Stalinization came in 1950,” Milosz says. “I decided I couldn’t stomach it.” He asked for political asylum in Paris a year later. Sitting in his small, cozy living room overlooking the Bay, the world of Stalin’s reign of terror seems impossibly remote, almost mythical. Not so for Milosz, a man who wrote one of the most remarkable passages in 20th-century literature about state terror. In Milosz’s description of the effects of totalitarianism, he recalls diving to the ground when Germans began strafing the street; in Milosz’s pocket was a copy of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” which he had been studying moments before: “A man is lying under machine gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of man judge all poets and philosophers. Let us suppose…that a certain poet was the hero of the literary cafes…. [H]is poems, recalled in such a moment, suddenly seem diseased and highbrow. The vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real, and poetry based on equally naked experience could survive triumphantly that judgment day of man’s illusions.” The late Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, recording his reaction to the book from Argentinean exile, noted that Milosz, at one stroke, had shifted the moral center of European literature one thousand miles east. His book also inspired a young Robert Hass, who read it as a freshman in 1960: “I wanted to read poetry by people who did not assume that the great drama in their work was that everything in the world was happening to them for the first time,” he commented. But Milosz prefers to talk about the present, including Hass’s translation of his Treatise of Poetry, one of Milosz’s master works, written in the 1950s and never before published in full in English (it will be released this fall by Ecco Press). “I received an absolutely enthusiastic letter from [the well-known American critic] Helen Vendler,” he says. “She said, ‘You speak of the most horrible things, but in a voice of superhuman calm.’” Milosz reflects, and says: “I tried to learn that way of being sober, of speaking without exaltation and without exaggeration.” He has succeeded. Milosz was invited to teach at Berkeley in 1960. The University’s Slavic department was strong, though not in Polish. Milosz, for his part, had been living meagerly on his writings. With a family to feed, he accepted the offer, although with uncertainty. “I did not choose California. It was given to me,” he has written. “I should say something to the credit of the University,” he says now. “I came here as a lecturer. A few months later, I got tenure—without the intervening steps, and in spite of the fact that I had no Ph.D. It is a great achievement of the University to have the freedom to do that. They wanted to secure me so that I would not return to France. And it kept me from returning for some years. They had no reason to regret their decision.” The early years were hard ones. Poet Leonard Nathan, a Berkeley professor emeritus and translator of Milosz, says: “I’m not sure the people in his department knew what he was or what he was owed. I came here in the ’60s as a faculty member, and I didn’t know his name.” Milosz’s despair at the time is echoed in these self-mocking lines from “A Magic Mountain,” written in Berkeley in 1975: So I won’t have power, won’t save the world? Fame will pass me by, no tiara, no crown? Did I train myself, myself the Unique, To compose stanzas for gulls and sea haze, To listen to the foghorns b |
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