It is the late 1970s. From his study on Grizzly Peak, California, a 66-year-old man gazes out on the Pacific Ocean, and asks himself: “Who was I? Who am I now?”
This man is Czesław Miłosz. Born into a Lithuanian-Polish family in 1911, he studied law in Vilnius before making his name as a young poet, “a catastrophist”, in the 1930s. As a newly translated biography by Andrzej Franaszek recounts, Miłosz spent much of World War II in Warsaw, witnessing the “meat-grinder of history” as it went into overdrive. Later he would be awarded the medal of Righteous among the Nations for his efforts to help Jewish families escape capture.
After the war, he embarked on a doomed career as a diplomat, before eventually defecting to France and later America, where he would become Professor of Slavic Studies at Berkeley (and occupant of that study on Grizzly Peak). His prose work The Captive Mind is a famous indictment of the awful humiliation of conscience and intellect inflicted by communism. In 1980, Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 2004 at the age of 93 and is buried in Kraków.
Miłosz’s was quite a life: “I reach 80, I fly from San Francisco to Frankfurt and Rome, a passenger who once travelled three days by horse carriage from Szetejnie to Wilno.” In asking himself those questions as he looked out across the Pacific, Miłosz was providing “the impetus for the long-deferred telling of ‘certain spiritual adventures’ ’’, resulting in The Land of Ulro, first published (in Polish) 40 years ago. It is a brooding, complex, occasionally baffling book.
The name Ulro comes from William Blake. It denotes for Miłosz the realm of spiritual pain “borne by the crippled man”; crippled, that is, by the victory of the scientific worldview, where blind determinism holds sway; where there is, at bottom, a Natura devorans and a Natura devorata (devouring nature and devoured nature) and nothing else; where personhood and communion between persons, and with their God, are illusions.
Blake, Swedenborg, Dostoevsky and a host of Polish literary giants loom over page after page. Beckett, meanwhile, is lauded as the most honest of the moderns, the one who made things clear: so you killed God and think you can get away with it? The Land of Ulro is also highly revelatory of the influence of Catholicism on Miłosz as poet, thinker and man. It is laced with references to an “ecstatically religious childhood” of carols, Month of Mary devotions, Vespers, Nativity plays and litanies sung in the circle of family and servants.
Oscar Miłosz, a distant relative, fellow poet and another rebel against Ulro, exiled in Paris, recalled his first meeting with Czesław in a letter to a friend: “I was confronted by a handsome young man of 19, a poet as passionate as he is poised, full of deference towards me because of my work, loyal to the monarchic, Catholic and aristocratic tradition in its more intelligent and nobler aspects, with enough of the communist in him to be of service to this incredible age of ours.”
Had he not been raised a Catholic, Miłosz thought that his fate as an inhabitant of Ulro would have been “pitiable”. He felt a “profound gratitude” to the Church for making him receptive to Christ and poetic inspiration. One of his deepest friendships was with Fr Josef Sadzik, director of the publishing house of the Pallottine Fathers in Paris. A man who once “proudly dissociated” himself from Polish Catholicism, Miłosz also met, exchanged letters with and wrote an ode to Pope St John Paul II. In one of the letters, written in 2004, Miłosz observed: “Over the past few years I have been writing my poems with the intention not to deviate from Catholic orthodoxy”.
And what of the poetry itself (which, alas, I can appreciate only in translation)? God is never far away in the poems, even if they often worry that he is very far from us. In “Why”, the question is posed: “Where are the solemn assemblies of peoples under a sky pierced by the lightning of the One and Holy?” The answer: “Fearful, they rub their eyes, knowing only that there is no limit to evil. Enough to shout joyfully, and evil will return with force.”
Miłosz called himself an “ecstatic pessimist”. “On Prayer” notes that if there is “no other shore / We will walk the aerial bridge all the same”.
Another poem begins:
How it should be in Heaven I know, for
I was there,
By its river. Listening to its birds.
In its season: in summer, shortly after sunrise.
It evolves into a superb meditation on the afterlife:
Peace eternal could have no mornings and no evenings,
Such a deficiency speaks against it.
And that’s too hard a nut for a theologian to crack.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.