Miłosz: A Biography By Andrzej Franaszek, translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker,Harvard university press, £30
Near the outset of this new biography of Czeslaw Miłosz, the Polish poet and Nobel Prize-winner, is a beguiling depiction of a time of peace in rural Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), where Miłosz was born in 1911. For its harmony between inhabitants and nature, and between the social classes, it might be the Shire. The world, young Miłosz learned, could be “a homely place, blessed by human toil and care”.
But this “earthly paradise” would not last: “States were falling, countries passed away / Chimeras of the human mind besieged us,” he wrote in “Caffè Greco”.
From the age of 10, Miłosz lived in Wilno (Vilnius), “a Baroque pearl hidden among the vast Northern forests”. He thought he would grow up to be a botanist or ornithologist, until the cruelty of nature began to disturb him.
Once, in his late teens, demented by a perceived amorous betrayal, he played a solo game of Russian roulette. The sensitive boy-cum-adolescent conjured up by Andrzej Franaszek seems very similar to the aged man staring out from the cover of the book: gruff but vulnerable; curious but guarded; kindly but fierce.
Miłosz rebelled passionately against school, nationalism, bourgeois complacency, Polish Catholicism and authority generally. This young man of the 1930s was left-wing, devoid of anti-Semitic prejudices and tired of “the whole morass of capitalism”. But he was unable to accept Soviet-led communism as the path to justice. As a contemporary put it, Polish writers were on a “merciless chessboard”, compelled to move between two constricting colours.
Miłosz spent World War II in occupied Warsaw. There he witnessed street executions and sudden deportations; a Christmas play performed by girls rescued from prostitution; the Uprising of 1944; and the poignant last moments of a German soldier captured by Soviet troops.
A doomed stint as a post-war diplomat ended in a traumatic defection in 1950, making Miłosz an unperson not only in Poland itself, but to many Poles in the West too. At this point, he was also completely at odds with his wife, who wanted to build a new life in the United States, where she and their two sons were living. Miłosz was in France and disdained America as a “spiritual void”.
In 1960, however, he accepted a post at Berkeley, setting up a 30-year culture clash of epic but fruitful proportions. He counted Einstein, Camus and Merton among his friends and correspondents.
Much of Miłosz’s work arose from the tension between craving “the divine promise inside creation” and the realities of war, political chaos and undeserved suffering. He was mesmerised by incidents, gestures, faces and people from the vanished past. Rescuing them from oblivion was a duty. So too was honouring “one real tree, one real droplet of dew” over grand theories and abstractions.
Miłosz railed repeatedly against the reduction of human beings to “insects”, whether by science or armies or ideology. He admired and understood writers like Samuel Beckett, but always, somehow, set his face against outright despair. Seamus Heaney, a particularly fine Miłosz critic, praised him for fulfilling “the appetite for seriousness and joy, which the word ‘poetry’ awakens in every language”.
Time and again, Franaszek allows himself to succumb to, and celebrate, the spirit of Miłosz. But he also sticks to his task as a biographer and keeps a fairly cold eye on reality. Miłosz was a complex man who led a complicated life, with its own failures and mistakes. He was capable of Olympian intellectual hauteur, and had a “monstrous egoism”, which he acknowledged, but couldn’t renounce.
Family life too was scarred by tragedy: one of his sons suffered serious psychiatric illness and his wife contracted motor neurone disease. He was a great artist and a tortured soul, who, nevertheless, found a measure of peace again before he died.
Miłosz’s second marriage played a part in this, as did religion. Though he would always oscillate between faith and doubt, Catholicism assumed more and more significance for him as life wore on. The awarding of the Nobel Prize, along with the election of John Paul II and the emergence of Solidarity, was part of an extraordinary period when Poland re-announced itself on the world stage.
Miłosz grew close to both the Polish pope and Lech Wałęsa and came back to live in Kraków in the 1990s, where (despite the objections of some who questioned both his Polish and Catholic credentials) he is buried in Skałka Church, alongside numerous other great artists and thinkers.
What a life. Franaszek has done it justice. This is an enthralling book from the first page to the last.
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