Only a hundred or so people showed up at Campbell Hall on the campus of UC Santa Barbara on that April evening in 1986. I wondered why there were so few.
True, the speaker's fame in America did not approach the admiration accorded him in Europe. But he had won the Nobel Prize for literature six years before and had been teaching at Berkeley since the 1960s. His 1953 book, "The Captive Mind," had brilliantly explained his revulsion from the brutal inhumanity of a Soviet Marxism attractive to many young Polish intellectuals of his generation.
We knew that Czeslaw Milosz was in his mid-70s and seemed unlikely to be giving public readings much longer. But he had continued to write, his poems were published in English, and a collection of his poems was due to appear the following year. I pondered the fact that few students were on hand and that the English faculty had almost entirely stayed away.
But I could see a few of our city's central Europeans. They had come knowing about him. Perhaps they had read "The Captive Mind"; some may have shared the hardships and dangers of his life under both the Nazi and Soviet occupations.
With customary graciousness Dimitrye Djordjevic of the History Department introduced him, and we saw a straight-backed, strong looking man of middle height, of solid but not heavy build, his high, sloping forehead and combed-back hair, black and full. What struck us particularly were his eyes. They were of startling directness, penetrating yet friendly, the pupils dark, set wide apart and overhung by heavy, curling eyebrows. His brow was deep and wide, his mouth full, his chin broad and strong. He wore no glasses; deep lines curved down from his nose, but he did not look his age.
How then did he address us? Portentously, magisterially? Not at all. He set about winning us to him, and joked genially about his pronunciation. The accents of his deep voice were clearly Central European, but perfectly understandable, retaining a few typical difficulties. The word "thing" came out as "tinga."
He began with poems written as a young man in Paris, one of them set in the metro. The speaker entranced by a pretty girl, unable to take all of her in, as "a sponge suffering because it cannot saturate itself." The humor, frustration and self-deprecation of these lines persisted in the poems he read. (In his late 80s, we learned recently, he still wished fiercely to absorb all he saw, their colors, lights and shapes.) The romantic struggle, "the desire of the moth for the star," was his from the beginning.
He was, his poem "Preparation" then attested, striving to write "a great book/In which my century will appear as it really was." But he had not learned to speak calmly of the child swept into a clay pit by a bulldozer --- "Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy." Just as he would always love the moment, wish it to be eternal, and reluctantly reconcile himself to contradiction, he would never be mature enough or objective enough or believe he had caught full reality.
He described how the daemon would seize him, and he would write under direction and thank the God-Enchanter for the gift. But he also apologized: He did "not know anything else to do/ [He felt] greatly ashamed but unable to change [his] fate." A complicated man.
We were in fact hearing Milosz at a point in his self-knowing, a reason why I think this composed and distinguished man was so open to us. Perhaps because he had in hand a "recently written" poem of startling frankness, "Consciousness," now a classic. There he feels himself subsumed by all the raw, particularity of everything --- the woods of New Hampshire in May, "bodies drawing close on the banks of a river...the inscrutable doggishness of dogs," typically realizing [his poem] "won't be much, for language is weak."
And though he knows "The shame of whispering to the confessional grille" and prays "Litanies to the Maiden/Mother of the Creator," he also describes the "fat and lean, old and young, male and female /as they defile in the corridors of an airport." Of it all he presents a report, but to whom, he says, he doesn't know. We were silenced.
Who of us could guess the full dimensions of the man before us?
Yes, we knew of his ravaged years between clashing totalitarianisms, but we knew only a few poems. He had written in Polish and much of his work was not yet available in English. Later, we came to know him as translator of Biblical texts from Hebrew and Greek, as rigorous student of philosophers from Christian medievals through Swedenborg to Karl Popper, as the supporter of victims of the Holocaust, and, marveling, the wonders of his full range of unceasing, persistent lyricism over seventy years. There are dozens of essays, a diary, novels, 20 books of poetry, some of it to be published this year.
They will be published posthumously, for Czeslaw Milosz died Aug. 14 at age 93 in his beloved Krakow. Obituaries throughout Europe and in the United States, in Jewish and Palestinian newspapers, from France, Germany and Russia, have been long and brimming with admiration. Lech Walesa links him with Pope John Paul II in encouraging the revolt of workers in Gadansk; Joseph Brodsky calls him "one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest."
Though his early struggles were political, he was always engaged by spiritual, theological questions, and it is said he shocked listeners to his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard by asking, "Is non-eschatological poetry possible?" For him it was not, and though he was a poet of sense experiences and saw the horrors of this world, he had also learned from Simone Weil to accept contradictions. He trusted his senses first; secondarily his mind, and, further than both, his passion for the Real (capitalized) world, above quotidian reality. "All poetry is in pursuit of [that] Real."
He remained a practicing Catholic, though not entirely a conventional one. His poems often find resolution in faith; still the tug of the present and his love of "the mighty world of eye and ear" were too much of the essence of his poet's being. "I am only a man; I need visible signs," he wrote in a poem beginning, "Come, Holy Spirit."
From "A Poem for the End of the Century":
When everything was fine
And the notion of sin had vanished
And the earth was ready
In universal peace
To consume and rejoice
Without creeds and utopias,
Don't think, don't remember
The death on the Cross,
Though everyday He dies,
The only one, all-loving,
Who without any need
Consented and allowed
To exist all that is,
Including nails of torture. Patrick McCarthy is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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