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My Conversation with Czeslaw Milosz
Ricochetti have asked me to share more of my encounters with the famous (via my career on public television and as a magazine editor). A while back (in my reminiscence of a catastrophic interview with Terry Jones of Monty Python and author Douglas Adams), I mentioned that I thought most of the tapes had been erased. I told Susan Quinn the same thing about my interview with the philosopher/psychologist Viktor Frankl.
As it turns out, all of the tapes of the eight seasons of “Malone” survive. They were collected and restored by KQED in San Francisco, and they now reside in a joint archive run by PBS and the Library of Congress here.
Yesterday’s item by Mark Eckel mentioning Czeslaw Milosz reminded me of my encounter with the man:
It was not the best time or place to interview an 80-year-old man – a cold, dark and wet night in early December. But I wasn’t going to miss a chance to meet one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, a Nobel laureate, and, for his work helping Jews escape the Nazis, recently named “Righteous Among the Nations” by the government of Israel.
The setting was an odd one: Berkeley’s venerable Shattuck Hotel, which was in the midst of being shuttered for a decade until investors could be found for a restoration. We were told to set up in the empty, cold, and lonely restaurant in the midst of tables covered with piled chairs. It was less foreboding than sad, and the spotlights, once they were set up and turned on, marginally warmed the cavernous, echoing room.
I’m not sure what I anticipated from Milosz. But when he realized that he was nothing like I expected – and yet everything like it. He arrived alone – my notes told me that he had recently lost his wife (he wouldn’t marry again for a few more years) – and apparently didn’t yet need assistance moving about. I assumed he had come from a class he was teaching at Cal, which was just a few blocks away.
In appearance, he was formidable – not the tough-looking figure of his younger years, the one on the Lithuanian postage stamp. But, rather, in his worker’s cap, shapeless woolen jacket (glittering with rain drops) and baggy pants, he looked more like an old Polish dock worker – which he might have become were it not for WWII and the fact that he was a genius. His voice was gruff, his accent thick.
But what struck most was his face. I was surprised to see, close-up, how much he looked like Andy Rooney. Only Milosz’s brows were black and even bushier. And his face was formidable in its toughness. This was a man who had seen it all: the best and most certainly the worst of humanity. He had suffered through the invasion of Poland by both the Nazis and the Soviets, fought in the underground and been captured, survived the bombardment of Warsaw’s Jewish quarter, helped Jews escape, and then had made his own escape from Stalin’s grip. His Nobel Prize award properly said that Milosz “voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.”
And yet, as tough as he was, there also was a gentleness in his manner. He had survived, raised a family, enjoyed a long marriage, and now was being honored by the world. But more important, I think, he had turned those experiences, many of them horrible, into art – into great poetry and classic memoirs. It had all been given a purpose.
Television interview shows are short – in my case, just a half-hour – so we didn’t have time to dwell much on any topic. And yet, there was time for one epiphany. I was asking Milosz about life as a child in the Lithuanian town of Seteniai, then part of Poland. I asked how much he remembered of it.
Suddenly, the great poet’s face softened, and under those beetle brows, his eyes went far away. “I remember everything,” he told me in his thick accent. “In my mind,” I remember him saying, “I recall every street, every building, every doorway. I can walk down those streets in my mind and it’s all there. I can visit any time.”
Then his eyes focused again. “Of course,” he said, “All of it has changed. But, whenever I want, I can still visit what was.”
Looking back, I realize that on that bitter evening in a deserted hotel, Milosz had offered me a glimpse of the burden, and the joy, of being a great artist. His perfect memory gave him the engine that powered his work, but it also meant that he carried the burden of precisely remembering a beautiful world that had been brutally raped and destroyed by the greatest of evils.
When we finished, Milosz gave me a crisp shake with his big, meaty hands, pulled up the collar on his jacket, tugged down the brim of his cap, and headed off alone into the cold and dark winter night.
Published in Literature
All of that cloaked in an unassuming figure, now belonging legend and history:
Thank you so much for sharing this treasure.
Fantastic account. Thank you for sharing.
What a treasure trove of encounters you have had in your life.
Thank you for sharing your time with Milosz with the ricochet community.
Thanks so much for sharing your recollection of him, Michael. I’m also glad that your shows have been preserved for posterity.
You can’t go down every street via StreetView to see what it looks like now, but you can go into the south edge of the village to see what it looked like in 2012.
Thanks for telling us about your conversation.
From the StreetView photography, you can see that the land falls away to the west. The river at the bottom of that lowland is the Nevezis, which Wikipedia tells me is the eastern edge of the Samogitia region. Samogitia is on the other side of the river from Miłosz’s childhood village. It was the last bit of Europe to be converted to Christianity back in the Middle Ages.
I had recently encountered the name Samogitia while reading Serhii Plokhy’s book, The Origins of the Slavic Nations, which I was inspired to read to learn more about the controversy between Ukraine and Russia over which of the two nations is the true heir of Kievan Rus. (Some Ukrainians claim that Russia stole their history.)
According to Wikipedia, Samogitia “was the main source of the Lithuanian cultural revival during the 19th century and was a focal point for the smuggling of books printed in the Lithuanian language, which was banned by the occupying Russians.” And these days there are people who are trying to keep alive the Samogitian identity and their own dialect of the Lithuanian language.
It makes one wonder if that cultural spirit of independence leaked across the river and affected young Czesław Miłosz. But of course, not everybody in that region grew up to be Czesław Miłosz.
I didn’t catch it at first, but there is also a Streetview 360 degree image of the Czesław Miłosz cultural center, a stone’s throw away from the south edge of the village. You can get a good view of the way the land slopes down to the river.
Speaking of which, it’s interesting the way the village streets are laid out. Instead of the village being long and narrow, laid out along both sides of a road (as is common in much of central and eastern Europe) there are instead a number of small streets perpendicular to the river. I would make a small bet that when Miłosz was a boy those streets extended as well-trodden paths all the way down to the river. Maybe they still do.
I wonder if that’s common wherever there are villages along a river. My own grandmother’s village along the Vistula River was not laid out like that, judging from maps from the 1920s and 1930s, but it sort of reminds me of the French settlements along the Detroit River and other rivers in North America. Each family owned a long, narrow strip of land, with one of the short edges being a piece of the bank of the river. You can still see traces of that type of land parcel on cadastral maps and even on satellite images.
When I saw the above I nodded, thinking I had seen such an article and that I would get around to reading it soon. But now when I went looking for it, I couldn’t find it. Any ideas?
I read these sentences of yours with a blow to my heart:
“Looking back, I realize that on that bitter evening in a deserted hotel, Milosz had offered me a glimpse of the burden, and the joy, of being a great artist. His perfect memory gave him the engine that powered his work, but it also meant that he carried the burden of precisely remembering a beautiful world that had been brutally raped and destroyed by the greatest of evils.”
If I had read these words 10 years ago, or even 7, I would sigh and think about the tragedy that befell all the people caught in the grip of two horrendous world wars. The kids who learned to play in the shelter of buildings hollowed out by mortars. The young couples who danced and who loved and who were separated from the normalcy of marriage and the resulting children by a draft summons, from which the young men might depart from their homes and never return the same in mind or body. The elderly whose lives were shattered when food ran out, when the Gestapo pounded on their door, when something affected them past the point of any return.
Reading those words of yours today, I shudder.
I shudder because our Western societies are today facing that same vise grip, our safe and beautiful world being destroyed by, as you put it, “the greatest of evils.”