Cynthia L Haven - Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life

CZESAW MIOSZ

Copyright 2021 by Cynthia L. Haven

All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.

The author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities for the writing of this book. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Excerpts from Flight, Magic Mountain, I Sleep a Lot, To Mrs. Professor in Defense of My Cats Honor and Not Only, You Who Wronged, A Confession, On Salvation, and Winter from New and Collected Poems: 19312001 by Czesaw Miosz. Copyright 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001 by Czesaw Miosz Royalties, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpts from Thornton Wilders letter to Czesaw Miosz are published with the consent of the Wilder Family LLC, and in agreement with the Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved. The Bed by the Window, copyright 1932 by Robinson Jeffers; from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers by Robinson Jeffers. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpts from An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesaw Miosz, edited by Cynthia L. Haven, copyright 2011 by Ohio University Press. Used by permission of Ohio University Press. Excerpted letter from Janina Miosz to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, 1951, used by permission of Anthony Miosz.

All reasonable attempts were made to locate the copyright holders for the material published in this book. If you believe you may be one of them, please contact Heyday and the publisher will include appropriate acknowledgment in subsequent editions of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Haven, Cynthia L., author.

Title: Czesaw Miosz : a California life / Cynthia L. Haven.

Description: Berkeley, California : Heyday, [2021] | S eries: [California lives] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021017867 (print) | LCCN 2021017868 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597145534 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781597145534 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Miosz, CzesawHomes and hauntsCalifornia. | Authors, Polish20th centuryBiography. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC PG7158.M5532 H38 2021 (print) | LCC PG7158.M5532 (ebook) | DDC 891.8/58709 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017867

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017868

Cover Art: Janet Fries / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Cover Design: Ashley Ingram

Interior Design / Typesetting: Rebecca LeGates

Published by Heyday

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Adam Zagajewski, who made Krakw come alive for me.

For Julia Hartwig, the Warsaw poet who died in America,
far from her homeland.

In the late 1970s, Mark Klus was raking leaves and twigs at Czesaw Mioszs Berkeley home on Grizzly Peak. The former student of the Polish poet remembers him laughing, then explaining, If California is not a separate planet, it is at least a separate colony of the planet Earth.

What did he mean? California was not wholly the Earth, because it was like a prehistoric landscape where human activity and civilization had no place, and were completely dwarfed, Klus told me. There is an air of detachment in Californiathroughout the West, really. For this reason, I say California was a desert for Miosz. He eventually developed a deep ambivalence toward the placealthough what wasnt Miosz deeply ambivalent about?

Miosz had expressed the same thought in a discussion of California in his Visions from San Francisco Bay: Our species is now on a mad adventure. We are flung into a world which appears to be a nothing, or, at best, a chaos of disjointed masses we must That is from the English translation, but in the original Polish version, the phrase mad adventure is ksiycowa przygoda, literally lunar adventure, which conveys not only the sense of lunacy but also explains Mioszs sense of Californias role as a colony, a place colonized by the rest of the Earth. Hence, its contradictions.

Miosz, an oceanic thinker as well as writer, spent four decades of his life, the bulk of his literary career, here. He was an American citizen, an American writer, and an eminent professor at the University of California, Berkeleyand he is still its only Nobel Prize winner in the humanities. Yet his beginnings were far away, starting with his 1911 birth on his familys Lithuanian manor, among the Polish-speaking gentry. His literary career took him to Warsaw and, after its destruction, to a diplomatic post in the United States, where he served the Stalinist government of Poland. He defected in Paris, and then, nearly a decade later, was invited to teach in California. With the birth of a free Poland, he repatriated and died in Krakw in 2004. He had a hybrid identity, despite himself.

The irony is that the greatest Californian poetand certainly one of Americas greatest poets, toocould well be a Pole who wrote a single poem in English, To Raja Rao. He admitted so himself: In a certain sense, Im an American poet, although its clear that all my poems are translated from the Polish. He is not read with the same earnestness he was after his 1980 Nobel, but the fault is ours, not his: You pay attention in a different way when reading Miosz, said his publisher Daniel Halpern, perhaps commenting on the fact that, more than forty years out from that Nobel win, we are not living in an age noted for its long attention span.

California shaped Mioszs thinking, and in ways that we havent fully recognized or acknowledged. Perhaps the reason is that California itself is not understood. Its prominence in the nation is often reduced to a clich, obscuring its real differences and its unique role in the nation and the world. To understand the importance of place for the Nobel poet, we have to defamiliarize the land we think we know, and also restore it to what it was when he first encountered it, as he began to discover America in the postwar years: the years before Silicon Valley was born, before the Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury social upheavals revolutionized a nation, before the wine industry had recovered from Prohibition and California cuisine had been inventeda time when hard liquor was still the universal social lubricant.

At first, his preoccupations, almost obsessionshistory, language, civilization, time, and truthseemed irrelevant in the place in which he had, half reluctantly, made his home. Yet over time, these two worlds, these two realitiesCalifornia and Eastern Europereflected, illuminated, even interpenetrated each other. In doing so, they transfigured him from a poet writing from one corner of the world to a poet who could speak for all of it; from a poet focused on history to a poet concerned with modernity and who, always, had his eyes fixed on forever. Though Miosz wrote in Polish, he worked closely with his American translators. While he often disagreed vehemently with America, he was, to use Susan Sontags term, a creator of inwardness in a land that has often needed it.