An Invisible Rope, Portraits of Czesław Miłosz EDITED BY Cynthia L. Haven (Ohio University Press, 2011) From the Publisher: “Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) often seemed austere and forbidding to Americans, but those who got to know him found him warm, witty, and endlessly enriching. An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz presents a collection of remembrances from his colleagues, his students, and his fellow writers and poets in America and Poland. Miłosz’s œuvre is complex, rooted in twentieth-century eastern European history. A poet, translator, and prose writer, Miłosz was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1961 to 1998. In 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The earliest in this collection of thirty-two memoirs begins in the 1930s, and the latest takes readers to within a few days of Miłosz’s death. This vital collection reveals the fascinating life story of the man Joseph Brodsky called ‘one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.'”

When a great poet such as Czesław Miłosz stands high on the literary scene, a first impression may merely show a cardboard cutout of a celebrity recognized by bushy eyebrows above clear, blue eyes and the booming sound effects of hearty laughter. To reveal the full depth of the poet, however, this collection of essays provides perspectives from those who knew the multi-dimensional man and his multi-faceted contribution to poetry in general and Polish literature in particular. In the “Introduction,” for example, editor Cynthia L. Haven lists a virtual Who’s Who of poets who thrived as translators under Miłosz’s tutelage – Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, and Richard Lourie – each of whom has contributed greatly to the literary community and to the insightful essays in this book. To reveal the full depth of the poet… this collection of essays provides perspectives from those who knew the multi-dimensional man and his multi-faceted contribution to poetry in general and Polish literature in particular. The story begins, though, “Way Back in Wilno,” where Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier met Miłosz prior to World War II. During the time, she was a child and he a student of her father, Manfred Kridl, a professor of Polish literature in Wilno (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania) the site of a major Polish university. Although Miłosz graduated from Wilno University with a law degree, he did not practice law. In a letter written years later to his former instructor, he explained that his leftist opinions on Polish politics “did not mean that I am in the least attracted to some internationalism or cosmopolitanism. I am steeped in Polish literature and want to remain faithful to it.” Nevertheless, Valkenier reminded readers that Miłosz’s “first success with a wide English-speaking audience” came through “his political book, The Captive Mind, an analysis of what attracted Polish intellectuals to communism.” For readers interested in poetry rather than politics, the first few chapters may first seem filled with political turmoil, propelling the poet out of his native land in search of himself and asylum. While in Paris, Miłosz translated various books of the Bible into Polish at a time, according to essayist Marek Skwarnicki, “when publishing the Bible in Poland had been forbidden by the official atheistic Communist government.” Skwarnicki, a reporter who often accompanied Pope John Paul II on his journeys, also reported in his “Half a Century with Miłosz” the gist of a question Miłosz asked in his last letter to the Pope. As Skwarnicki recalled, Miłosz wanted to know “did the pope, who read everything that Miłosz had written, feel that in any of his poems, Miłosz had overstepped the boundaries of the Roman Catholic orthodoxy?” Skwarnicki went on to say, “This question moved me enormously, for it is well known that the chronicles of Miłosz’s soul are very tumultuous.”

Troubled by religion and politics, Miłosz found an easier calling in mentoring poets in and out of the classroom. In the essay, “My Apprenticeship with Miłosz,” Reuel Wilson, son of writers Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy, wrote, “Miłosz’s lack of prejudice and his omnivorous intellectual curiosity made him an ideal teacher. Having chosen to defect from his job as a diplomat representing his country’s Communist regime, he made a total break from Europe when he moved from France to California. Isolated from old friends and his reading public at home, he successfully reinvented himself as an American university professor” with full tenure at Berkeley where his initial “move to California entailed a substantial culture shock.”

As Wilson further recalled, “In the classroom, Miłosz dressed rather informally. He often wore a plaid work shirt under a well-worn brown sport coat. His looks were striking: of medium height, he exuded physical energy and wiry resilience. I think he worked regularly in the garden beside his Tudor-style house on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, where he lived with his first wife, Janka, and their two sons.” With Miłosz at home overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, Wilson noted, “He could have stepped out of the primeval Lithuanian forest that his ancestors might have inhabited. Like them, he had a belief in the spirit world and a sense of intersecting time.”

In the essay, “A Difficult, Inspirational Giant,” Peter Dale Scott similarly commented, “I remember my admiring impression of Miłosz as a figure of religious enlightenment, nudging the world toward a third and more spiritual way between the godless communism of the Iron Curtain countries and the godless capitalism of the United States.”

‘He could have stepped out of the primeval Lithuanian forest that his ancestors might have inhabited. Like them, he had a belief in the spirit world and a sense of intersecting time.’

Poetry at the time had its political and religious zeal too. In “Remembering Czesław Miłosz,” double Pulitzer-winning poet W.S. Merwin talked about Miłosz’s prose work, The Captive Mind, saying, “That book appeared at the height of the timely but noisy controversy over the differences, real and concocted, between ‘academic’ and ‘Beat’ poets. For me the New Criticism had once seemed a liberation from late Victorian literary and cultural assumptions, but I was trying to get past all that, and I had been drawn to the poetry of other languages and traditions. Miłosz’s book had been a talisman and had made most of the literary bickering among the various ideological encampments, then most audible among the poetic doctrines in English, seem frivolous and silly.”

In “Nine Flashbacks,” Berkeley student Bogdana Carpenter, who later went on to write about the works of contemporary Polish poets, had this to say about her mentor’s method of teaching: “Miłosz’s open and unconventional approach put Polish literature in a new and unexpected light, far from the stereotype image of my Polish professors. They were also a dialogue, in fact, a double dialogue: Miłosz conversed not only with us sitting around the table but also with the authors whom we were reading, regardless whether they were our contemporaries or had lived five centuries earlier.”

Conversely, Henryk Grynberg reported in “Miłosz the Refugee” an interview when the poet “thought that American poetry is mostly incomprehensible because its ‘interiorization and subjectivization has caused a break in contact between the poet and reader.’ He said that ‘Americans reading Polish poetry in translation are amazed by the amount of the objective, eternal world [depicted there], outside of the human being as the subject, not just a psychological state of mind and purely subjective perceptions’.”

Poet Morton Marcus opened his essay “Uneasy Exile” with Miłosz’s two-line poem “On the Death of a Poet,” published before Miłosz’s own death: “The gates of grammar closed behind him. / Search for him now in the groves and wild forests of the dictionary.”

In the essay “I Can’t Write a Memoir of Czesław Miłosz,” Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski wrote about the differences in their eras, growing up in Poland: “He belonged to a chapter of the history of Polish literature that seemed to be, seen from the landscape of my youth, as remote as the Middle Ages…. He grew up in a small manor house in the Lithuanian countryside where woods, streams, and water snakes were as evident as streetcars and apartment houses in the modest, industrial city of my childhood. His Poland was totally different from mine: it had its wings spread to the East. When he was born in 1911, he was a subject of the Russian tsar.” And yet, “Beginning in 1951, the year of his defection, Miłosz had become an outcast, a nonperson. If his name did appear somewhere in print, it was frequently accompanied by an official Byzantine formula: ‘an enemy of the People’s Republic of Poland’.”

In her essay, “He Also Knew How to Be Gracious,” poet and educator Anna Frajlich provided this insight: “In Poland, his erstwhile friends attacked him cruelly after he defected to the West; in the West, most Poles attacked him equally cruelly for his former associations.” Nevertheless, “With the passing of time, he forgave most if not all of them.” And Miłosz continued to “show what is significant about the Polish contribution to universal values and culture. He did this by teaching, by translating his fellow writers – even when his former friends back in Poland denounced him – and by publishing Polish literature in the original and in translation and writing about it.”

Ironically, Miłosz’ own poetry was banned in his homeland even later than 1980 when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. After that, he complained to Madeline Levine that “he was writing into a vacuum.” As the poet-professor-translator recalled in her essay, “I Promised to Speak My Mind,” Miłosz told her, “Since he’d won the Nobel… almost no one would tell him that something he wrote wasn’t good enough,” so he made her promise she would always speak her mind.

Miłosz certainly spoke his! Upon his first meeting with Harvard Professor and well-known poetry critic Helen Vendler, Miłosz reportedly exclaimed “with acerbic disapproval, ‘Ah, the pope of poetry’.” In her essay, “Pretending to Be a Real Person,” Vendler admitted being “pained” when “merely doing my best to spread the word about contemporary poets whose writing, to my mind, deserved recognition.” And, “So I attended the rest of Miłosz’s intensely felt lectures, regretting our distance from each other but exhilarated by the immersion in his mind.”

In this collection of well-chosen essays that can only be touched on here, the editor gives a rounded view of the work Czesław Miłosz did and the ongoing need he felt for connections.

Somehow writer Judith Tannenbaum convinced Miłosz to immerse himself in teaching poetry to maximum security inmates in San Quentin. In “Miłosz at San Quentin,” Tannenbaum explained, “I introduced his work to my students soon after I began teaching at the prison. I told them that Miłosz had been born to the Polish-speaking class in Lithuania in 1911 and that he had lived through much of the horror that the twentieth century had to offer. He lived through World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw; he first served, then broke with, Communist Poland; he spent most of his life in exile.” Using this dispossession of home to establish a connection with the prison inmates, Tannenbaum “talked of how Miłosz’s poems conveyed both the cruelty he had witnessed and the joy of being a creature with consciousness, alive on this planet, able to witness. I let my students know I loved the poems’ ability to express the limitations of being human, while always remaining on the side of the human.”

When both of his wives preceded him in death, the human side poured into his poem “Orpheus and Eurydice,” for his beloved Carol, which began, “Only her love had warmed him, humanized him. / When he was with her, he thought differently about himself. / He could not fail her now, when she was dead.” After quoting those lines in the essay “On the Border of This World and the Beyond…,” author Joanna Zach commented that Miłosz “made me feel that what people say to each other is always important, irrespective of the subject matter, because, by merely using words, they contribute either to clarity and order or to chaos.”

Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney added his insights to Miłosz’s pursuit of clarity in the essay “In Gratitude for All the Gifts,” saying “His (Miłosz’s) yearning for a more encompassing form of expression than is humanly available was a theme to which he returned again and again…. Yet he also exulted in the certainty that he was called as a poet ‘to glorify things just because they are,’ and he maintained that ‘the ideal life for a poet is to contemplate the word “is”.’”

Reflecting a similar thought in the essay “Missing Miłosz,” Professor Natalie Gerber quoted a line from Miłosz’s poem “Ars Poetica” in which he wrote, “how difficult it is to remain just one person.” To that thought of the changing form of is-ness, Gerber wrote, “and that challenges us not to take refuge in private fancies, as romantic poetry does, but to participate in and be answerable to history in one’s own voice.”

Finding a voice for one’s is-ness often begins the life of poetry-writing. In “Interviews with Robert Hass,” the Pulitzer prize-winning poet described a place where poets and angels tread. “You know, to write a book of poems is to wrestle with an angel, and the first part of the task is to figure out what angel you are wrestling.” Hass added, “you scratch in the sand for a while, writing out of your obsessions. And after a while, you figure out what it is you are doing or need to do.”

Miłosz keenly felt this connection among peoples of all kinds and, during the many years his work was banned in his own country, the hope of a connection with readers he could not see nor even know at the time if they existed.

In this collection of well-chosen essays that can only be touched on here, the editor gives a rounded view of the work Czesław Miłosz did and the ongoing need he felt for connections. Caught in political battles, spiritual struggles, cultural conflicts, language changes, the traumatic loss of two wives, and the physical estrangement of exile from his homeland until he could finally move back to Poland in 2000, Miłosz experienced various degrees of isolation throughout his long life.

An Invisible Rope comes to us from Ohio University Press in 2011, the 100th anniversary of Czesław Miłosz’s birth. Somewhat akin to an umbilical cord for poets and poetry, that rope invisibly connects poets of the past to poets today and onward toward a literary future. Miłosz keenly felt this connection among peoples of all kinds and, during the many years his work was banned in his own country, the hope of a connection with readers he could not see nor even know at the time if they existed.

The rope uncoils, too, from “A Magic Mountain,” a poem by Miłosz which Robert Hass quoted in the final chapter: “I fashioned an invisible rope / And I climbed it and it held me.” As Hass explained, Miłosz “had to invent the idea that there was still somebody to read his poems.”

For years, he had no way of knowing if anyone in Poland read his poetry or not. After reading this book, however, poets and poetry lovers will most likely want to read not only the Nobel-winning poetry of this noble poet but the Polish poets whose work Czesław Miłosz translated into English for the love of poetry and its ability to connect peoples around the globe and across the ages.