This is KZSU, Stanford.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
We're coming to you from the Stanford camps.
The song is Black Cat from the album, Acquiring the Taste by our old friends,
Gentle Giant.
I chose the song because our show today deals with the Polish-American poet,
S.A.S. and Nobel laureate, Chez Lao Milosch.
And I happened upon a remarkable cat-pole of his,
which I thought I would read aloud in English to give you a taste of what kind of poet
we will be talking about in the next hour with my guest.
From what I'm able to gather, it's addressed to someone who had just published an S.A. titled
Against Cruelty.
The poem goes by the title to Mrs. Professor in defense of my cat's honor and not only.
Here we go.
My valiant helper, a small-sized tiger,
sleep sweetly on my desk by the computer, unaware that you insult his tribe.
Cats play with a mouse or with a half-dead mole.
You are wrong, though.
It's not out of cruelty.
They simply like a thing that moves.
For after all, we know that only consciousness can, for a moment, move into the other.
Empathize with the pain and panic of a mouse.
And such as cats are, all of nature is, in different elasse to the good and the evil.
Quite a problem for us, I am afraid.
Natural history has its museums, but why should our children learn about monsters,
an earth of snakes and reptiles for millions of years?
Nature devouring, nature devoured, butchery day and night smoking with blood,
and who created it?
Was it the good Lord?
Yes, undoubtedly they are innocent.
Spiders, mantises, sharks, pythons.
We are the only ones who say cruelty.
Our consciousness and our conscience alone, in the pale and till of galaxies,
put their hope in a humane God.
Who cannot but feel and think, who is kindred to us by his warmth and movement,
for we are, as he told us, similar to him.
Yet it is so, and he takes pity on every mould mouse, every wounded bird,
then the universe for him is like a crucifixion.
Such is the outcome of your attack on the cat, a theological, Augustinian grimace,
which makes difficult, are walking on this earth.
So from a house-cat sleeping near a computer to the amoral order of nature,
to the crucifixion of the universe, that's chislaw Milosch, condensing into a handful of
verses, the kind of thinking that only poets are capable of.
And speaking of thinking, Darwin wrote somewhere that the suffering of the lower animals,
throughout time, was more than he could bear to think of.
In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul wrote of the mulese of the earth as a whole, declaring,
"The whole creation has been groaning in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."
Maybe Paradise is open to all of God's creatures, as Pope Francis reportedly told a
distraught boy whose dog had just died. It's an edifying thought, but one that I suspect Milosch
would respond to by saying, "It should be so, even if it isn't so."
It was intensely aware was Milosch, that in its indifference a last to the good and the evil,
nature invariably has a way of flummoxing our human ideas of justice and our human longing for justice.
"My guest today is Cynthia Haven, a literary scholar, critics,
lavists and journalists. She's written for a wide range of publications, including the TLS,
the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, New York Times book review.
She's a national endowment for the humanity's public scholar, and she studied with Joseph Brodsky.
And as one many literary and journalistic awards, she's also the author of many excellent books
among them, "Evolution of Desire," a life of Kunejirad, a frequent guest on this program in the
earliest years when we launched back in 2005. Also, Joseph Brodsky, "Conversations,"
"Chaslau Milosch Conversations," and most recently, "Chaslau Milosch, a California Life,"
which came out with "Hey Day Press," up here in Berkeley, a really excellent press
in 2021. I'll also mention that Cynthia Haven runs the best literary blog in the blogosphere.
It's called "The Book Haven," and all of you literary-minded listeners out there will want to check that out,
"The Book Haven." Cynthia, welcome to entitled opinions. "Thank you Robert, pleasure to be here."
You spent several years researching and writing your recent biography of Milosch,
so I'd like to know first off, what was it that drew you to him in the first place, and
inspired you to devote so much of your time to writing a biography of his California life, as you call it?
Well, as you mentioned, I had been a student of Joseph Brodsky. I studied with him a few years
after his death, I was rereading some of his essays, and I came across a recommendation of
Teswaffe Milosch that he made as perhaps the greatest poet of our time. I'll read the statement,
"And for this was a statement to the 1978 Nuastat jury, which as one knows a Nuastat award is a
precursor for the Nobel, and it was in this case because Milosch got the Nobel two years later,
and this was the Joseph Brodsky recommendation, quote, "I have no hesitation whatsoever in
stating that Teswaffe Milosch is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.
Even if one strips his poems of the stylistic magnificence of his native Polish,
which is what translation inevitably does, and reduces them to the naked subject matter,
we still find ourselves confronting the severe and relentless mind of such intensity
that the only parallel one is able to think of is that of the biblical characters most likely job."
Well, that was a wow. I immediately began to look him up and try to find out more about him,
and I found out he lived across the bay from me. I'm in Palo Alto, he was across the bay
in Berkeley, where he had lived 40 years. Actually, that's more years than any other place he spent
in his life, and it's the focus of my book. We think of California as an interlude, but he spent
more time there than in Poland or Lithuania or really anywhere else. Anyway, I tried to arrange an
interview with him since I was a literary journalist. I thought this was a way of getting to
know him, as it had been for so many other people that I studied and wrote about. It wasn't easy.
He was 89. He was about to turn 89. It was near his birthday, and he wasn't giving interviews anymore.
So I began talking to his assistant. I mentioned Joseph Brodsky as my contact cartoon tray,
and it took six months, but I got an interview with him. We spoke for several hours
upon grizzly peak in his living room. After that, I asked if I could come back,
and he granted a second interview. It was a month later because I had a trip to Egypt in between.
And a second interview, I thought things went well, and that would be the beginning of a relationship,
but that turned out not to be the case. He went back to Poland for his regular visit every year,
his health declined, and he never returned to Berkeley. So that's the way I got to be the
last journalist to interview him in America. Were you able to accumulate enough information and insights
in your two meetings with him to feed your biography of his California life? I use those
excerpts from that interview a lot. I have a 7,000 word transcript. I was accepted for the Georgia
review. It became the basis of a study, a life-lunked or at least for me 20 years study now.
Of him, I was at that point. He was publishing a treatise on poetry for the first time in English.
This is the time lapse we experienced with me, which there was a 50 year lapse between the writing
of that great poem shortly after the war. It's a book length poem called Short Book
Lengths, called "Bome Called a Treatise on Poetry." It's a poem or a treatise in poetry.
I got it. Treatise in verse, got it. It was the first book of his that I'd read.
And it convinced you that he was indeed worthy of those hyperbodies that Joseph Broske had written down.
It convinced me that I was stepping into a very deep river. And it was just the beginning of my
exploration. And it would go on for 20 years without cessation. I'm still exploring. It's still
unfinished. He's endless. And do you, are you as devoted to him and his of her as you are and
were to Broskeeds? Because you've done a lot for Broske as well.
There's such different minds and such different people. I keep coming back to what his publishers
said to me. He referred to the continent, Mieboche. And I really feel like it's a world.
And you can see the fullness of Mieboche's knowledge. He never tired. He was never bored by anything.
There are all these stories about him. I'll tell a story that Robert Haas told me.
One day he came into Mieboche's house. And Mieboche was reading a book about women's underwear in the
late 19th century. It's sort of catalog. And Robert Haas said, what are you being that for? And he said,
he wanted to identify what was hanging on the clothes lines when he was a boy in Lithuania.
He was endlessly curious. He wanted to know anything. This is another story I love. He had been born
in Lithuania. And of course became a Polish poet. But because he was part of the Polish speaking
century, he had never actually learned Lithuanian. And he was starting to learn it in his 80s.
And Robert Haas says, why are you bothering to learn Lithuania now? And he said, because I think
it may be the language of heaven. Do we know why he said that? I don't know that the
Lithuanian is particularly melodious and angelic or what? He didn't specify.
But it was the language he heard growing up and perhaps that wasn't of. He very much idealized
Is Lithuanian childhood? So he is, as you call him a world or a planet more than even a continent,
that's presumably because he was many things. He was a poet. He was an essayist. He was a diplomat.
I mean, he had a career as a diplomat for a while. He had lived through all the major events and
disasters of the 20th century. And he was born before the beginning of World War I,
that's basically born in 1911. He lived through that war and then through the communist revolution
in Russia. And then the Second World War and the Holocaust and Stalinism. And in that
respect his biography, it really spans an entire century. He's a poet, as a essay,
he also wrote an important book about totalitarianism and the psychology of totalitarianism. So
I understand that he is extremely multidimensional. And is that your ambition and your biography is to
show just how all these different aspects of one individual life came together in one man?
That was a temptation I had to avoid. I wanted to look at him from a California perspective.
There's already been a masterful biography by Andre Proufenoczek, which has been translated into English,
Princeton University Press. I had to resist the temptation to write a 500 page book.
I wanted to keep in mind what he brought to us in California and what we brought to him.
And what did he bring to California? What did California give him?
Well, the most obvious thing, California gave him a place where he could write in peace and have a job.
You have to understand, he described Polish as an unheard of tongue in one of his poems.
There was no cash of Polish translators. There was not a community that he could plug into.
He saw that problem by in his class from training a generation of Polish translators,
people like Claire Kavanaugh, people like Wojdulurie, Bob Haas, Robert Pinsky. All of these people
brought what we call the sort of Polish flowering in the 20th century of literature
was because of his efforts. He made that happen. The first tasks he took on in California,
were writing the book's post-war Polish poetry, which introduced people like the big nephew, Herbert.
Fishfulo, the Shamborska, Tadeo, Shwazayevich, all these major figures, he brought them into
English. He and Peter Dale Scott of Berkeley did the first selected poems for the big nephew, Herbert.
But his history of Polish literature, which is a 600 page book, has been called a textbook that
can be read for fun. He introduced Polish culture, its literature, into the American and into the
Western world in English. What year does he arrive in California? 1960, he got an invitation out of
the blues. So most of his major work was written in California. Yes, it is remarkable.
It is remarkable. And it's something that goes so overlooked. I'm astonished because his
sensibility, the experience of the Holocaust, the war, the destruction of Warsaw, and all this
horribly dark history that he was a witness to, and his metaphysical sensibilities and his
intense awareness of the tragic disconnect between nature's amoral order and our human demand for
justice, as I mentioned in my introductory remarks, that California seems like the antithesis of
someone who understands the shadows and the darkness and the night world of human
tragedy and disaster. And here he finds himself in a state of the golden state with the clearness of the
view, the openness and the belief in the future and the kind of new age attitudes, it's quite
astonishing that he did so much creative work in the state of ours. We had peace. He was up on
grizzly peak. He was basically given carte blanche for biburcly to do what he wanted. And that was
the reason for the astonishing productivity. Yeah, but I was reading a poem that you brought my
attention to. I think it's about a California, is it a magic mountain? Yes. Is it a California
poem? Yes. That's early poem. That's 1973. 73, but he seems very ironic about California. Oh, yes.
He did not embrace California without ambiguity. Oh, a great deal of ambiguity. Do you want to read that one?
It's a bit long. So maybe maybe we'll hold off before we read it. And that's just, if you don't mind,
if he arrived in the 60s, a number of important things happened before he arrived and after the war
where he becomes a diplomat, correct? And he is sent to Washington, I think I believe, or New York to
Washington in the late 40s. This was right after the war. He was standing on the ruins of Warsaw,
men were unemployed. There were no jobs. The only jobs were government jobs pretty much. So he has
been criticized most recently by Ann Applebaum for taking a government job in the Stalinist government.
But as his son said, he got a job. He was a cultural attaché, which is the lowest ranking
appointment in the diplomatic corps. And he got to go abroad. This is big neph Herbert
was fighting much of his life to get that privilege. We were shut it off the bat by being a diplomat.
He arranged cultural exchanges and that sort of thing. He was sent to New York City, which of course is
especially then the literary capital of the US. He made many friends. We make the argument in my
book that he actually probably met WH on. He was a good friend with Thornton Wilder who helped
to go with great deal after he had defected. It was a playground. He went to the bread loaf conference.
He translated Negro spirituals. Then he was transferred to Washington at that point.
Thornton was coming down with a stronger hand with a lot of electoral developments in Poland.
And it was a government job, much more boring. He got moved to France and was a diplomat there.
And that's when he defects. That's when he defects. And why did he decide to defect?
There is an amazing storyteller where he was going back to Poland for a visit. He was coming from a
diplomat, a government party, probably Tuxedo, everything else. And as he was driving home,
probably half drunk, if not more, he saw a truck of people being taken away by the government
for questioning or whatever was going to be doomed to them shivering, even though it was a summer
night, it was cold. As he was all dressed up and parting on the government's dime, he was watching
the people being taken away to nobody knows where. And he said that night, he realized what he had
been a part of. I doubt it was the first time he had occurred to him, but it struck home in an important
way. Shortly after that, the government in Poland, while he was there took away his passport,
that was a sign that he was about to be arrested. He managed to finagle his passport back enough to
get back to France. And that's when he knew he had to make a move and defect. One morning, February
1st 1951, he went on to the street, laden with suitcases, and took a taxi to the outskirts of Paris.
That's when Maison Lafitte had an important emigrate community now legendary for its publications
and its maintenance of Polish culture in France during that time of when France was Stalinist.
In the subsequent few months, he was self-doubting. He wasn't sure he'd done the right thing. He was
drinking too much, pacing up and down and arguing with the people and making himself
a nuisance to Maison Lafitte. He was told not to appear in front of windows. It was that dangerous.
He could be kidnapped. And in those tormented months, he wrote the book, Captive Mind, which
is an exhalation of grief and recognition of what happens to the mind under totalitarianism.
Is it in the captive mind that he recounts the figure of swallowing frogs?
After his defection, he was the first defector from the communist government to give a press conference
and to give the reasons for his defection. And he said the paramount role of a poet is to tell the truth.
He compared communism to the process of swallowing frogs. You might be able to get one down,
perhaps even a second, but at the third frog, it's not the revolt of the mind or the feelings,
it's a revolt of the stomach. This actually compromised his friendships and relations with a number
of French intellectuals who were very pro-stalinists at this point, right?
The intelligentsia of France was pretty universally Stalinist. The Pablo Neruda had been a friend.
He was a cultural artache from Chile, similar position, a communist, wrote an essay about him
called "The Man Who Ran Away" that hurt on a lot of levels. All his friends divisured at him
with the powerful exception of Albert Camus.
Yeah, well, Camus, you can always count on Camus to come through for you.
So he defecks his, he's separated from his family. I think his wife is at this point back in
Poland or in America or somewhere in hell. His wife wasn't Washington DC where they had lived
together when he was as a cultural artache. His reappointment to France. They had not had a time to
bring her over yet. So yes, he was separated from his wife, his oldest son, and also his wife was
pregnant. She had had a very difficult first pregnancy and she was strongly advised not to go anywhere
by her doctors and the second birth was a traumatic one.
You how does he end up in California, Cynthia? Where did that offer to go to California come from?
He won a major literary award which turned around his finances somewhat in Europe,
major European award. He got an offer out of the blue from Berkeley.
He turned them down the first time in 1959, but the offer was renewed and he came to California in 1960.
Yeah, okay. So he publishes a bells and winter in 1978. He gets an Nobel Prize in 1980.
And then he remains in California until it, as we said, until 81 when the solidarity movement in
Poland had loosened things up and he goes back and forth between Poland and California for
the next couple of decades, right? Well, it was a remarkable experience to him. He didn't know
he had an audience in Poland. He thought nobody read him because he was basically a forbidden writer
and within days of his return to Poland, the presses were running and I think there was a hundred
thousand copies of his first book that sold out immediately. He was cheered in the streets. People were
following him and there was still a good number of his old friends from Poland that he could
meet he had a brother in Poland. He knew some of that, but as Helen Vennler put it, he didn't know
because he hadn't seen. He thought that he had no reputation in Poland at all and suddenly he was a
hero being followed and mobbed in the streets. He had an old world country to exalt poets.
A good old country like Poland imagine the homecoming of an American poet. It would go
without a ripple anyway. Well, I attended his 2000 poetry reading in Berkeley. It was the last
reading he gave it was during the time I interviewed him and I have to say I had never seen a
poetry reading like that. People were crowding to get into the
hall in Berkeley. I forgot the name of the hall. People were hanging from the ballast raids.
People were, it was like a rock star. I understand that that's a fraction of what he got in Poland,
but it was more than I'd ever seen for poetry reading in America.
Right. Well, Nobel Prize will do wonders for your attendance.
Plus being a homeboy. Yes, exactly. Do you think that he did his best work as a writer in California?
It's so hard to judge it accurately, isn't it? Because the bulk of his work was here and this is
something that people forget. He wrote remarkable poems about our people, our country, our
landscapes. Is there one you would like to read? Well, we've spoken so much about suffering.
He went through an enormous suffering in his life. The death of his first wife later,
everything. What bothers me when we talk about Mirosh, when I try to bring him to people,
I mention the name in their faces fall and they say, oh, poet of witness, holocaust, destruction
of Warsaw. But he was also a poet of the miraculous. He was a poet of wonder.
And as I've argued, he was the best poet of old age. We've had since a lot of women.
Anyway, here's a late life poem that shows some of that. It's called Awakened.
It's not a poem actually. It's a short prose, but I don't think you could call it a prose poem,
but anyway, here it is. In advanced age, my health worsening, I woke up in the middle of the night
and experienced a feeling of happiness so intense and perfect that in all my life,
I had only felt its premonition. And there was no reason for it. It didn't obliterate consciousness.
The past, which I carried, was there together with my grief and it was suddenly included,
was a necessary part of the whole. As if a voice were repeating, you can stop worrying now. Everything
happened just as it had to. You did what was assigned to you and you are not required anymore
to think of what happened long ago. The piece I felt was a closing of accounts and was connected
with the thought of death. The happiness on this side was like an announcement of the other side.
I realized that this was an undeserved gift and I could not grasp by what grace it was bestowed on me.
That's a poem that Nietzsche would call Amor Fati, the love of one's fate, whatever fate has
bestowed on you. I like that. I accept it with a certain kind of love.
That's a very promising poem. It's a promise that maybe on the other side there is
some kind of redemption. Often there are other poems in which he despairs of any sort of redemption.
The oddest see, for example, is a poem that doesn't have nearly the same opening into the miraculous,
as you call it. Let me see what he says there so that our listeners can get a sense of the other
side. No, it won't do by sweet theologians. Desire will not save the morality of God.
If he created beings able to choose between good and evil and they chose and the world lies in
iniquity, nevertheless there is pain and the undeserved torture of creatures, which would find its
explanation only by assuming the existence of an archetypal paradise and a pre-human downfall
so great that the world of matter received its shape of diabolical power. That's a modern day version of
mannequianism and the idea that the world that we inhabit is engendered and in the possession of
demonic powers, diabolical powers. We should have read awakened after the oddest see because it gives us
a much more forceful last word, I would say. The oddest see is one of his poems where it plays with various
hearices. This idea that the existence of an archetypal paradise is the notion that I mentioned at the
beginning where Pope Francis is reportedly to have said to a boy that paradise is open to all of God's
creatures. Apparently he may not have said that in exactly those words but I think
Miloch would have understood exactly what the Pope had in mind. Yes. I think one of the hearices that
he likes playing with the most, I think that's the most appealing to us, is Puckata Stasis,
which is a notion that's in the writings of origin, that all will be saved and everything will be
restored. All of creation will be renewed at the end of time. And how Catholic was he ultimately,
he was born Catholic but he certainly was not Orthodox in any. Yes he was not Orthodox.
And yet I spoke with someone who remembers seeing him at St. Mary Magdalene and Berkeley
after Vatican II and kneeling on the floor in prayer, rejecting the dealer and having his knees on
the stone ground, the floor, whatever it was. Leonard Nathan, who's a friend of his and a colleague at
Berkeley, reviewed one of his books and met him in the library and said, "I've really enjoyed
your poems, I reviewed them, but I have to say, I questioned some of your poems, you really play
with some hearices here in Miloch, Linda, and how do you think I feel? It's a practicing Catholic."
Exactly. So we fast forward a little bit to his, I'm curious, is he buried in Warsaw?
Krakow. Krakow. A Peter on the rock. So he spent his last years of his life in Poland.
Yes, in desire and also he was a health exile. His health became fragile. The only time he returned
after 2000 when I met him was when his second wife, his beloved second wife, an American second wife,
very American. He was brought into a southern family and was very close to the Sigmund family of Atlanta.
Suddenly became ill. She was a very healthy woman, had never been ill in her life,
and in desperation to save her. Save her, they flew her back to California.
And when he got word she was dying, he was not in condition to fly, but nonetheless,
he was told if you want to see your wife for the last time, this is your opportunity.
So that was his last time in California. And perhaps as the last time left a sort of bitter taste in his
mouth to lose a woman he had loved so much. After that he went back to Poland.
After that he went back to Poland, that's where he died. He was writing poems
to the last few days of his life, according to a woman who was helping him and assisting him at
that time. She said he was waking up in the morning in the hospital with poems in his head.
I'm assuming that he had what amounted to a national funeral. Is that correct?
It was a national funeral and there were demonstrations.
Pro and con. He was always controversial and he didn't quite fit in anywhere. There were people
protesting that he should not be given a state funeral because he was not actually Polish. He was
Lithuanian. There were people that were saying that he should not have a Catholic funeral because
he wasn't properly Catholic. He played with too many hearices. And it was only resolved with a letter
from the Pope saying that he'd been in communication with me. And he had told him that he was a proper
Catholic or unconventional proper Catholic. He got the benediction. He got the benediction.
Well that's great. Good for him.
May rest in peace. At one point the Pope came to him and said I don't understand what you're doing
with your religion. You come one step forward and then you go one step back where you go two steps
forward and then one. May most said is there any other way to write about religion in the 20th century?
Or 21st century to 21st century by that point? Yeah. Exactly.
21st century.
All right. All very interesting. So I think essentially you've been an ambassador for
Chaslo Miloch in a way that I think our listeners are going to want to go and read him
for themselves, both his poetry as well as his even his political writings captive mind is still in print
and well worth the read. And we've only scratched the surface. Yes.
And going deeper into the surface under the surface your book about a California life
published by Hay Day Press just this last year is an excellent place to start. So I hope so.
That's what I wanted it to be. All right. Because it's a world that you need to have some entry point.
Thanks again for coming on to entitled opinions in Thea.
Thank you for the opportunity.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Bye bye.
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