`Don't Complain'

I’ve met and spoken to one person who knew Zbigniew Herbert, and she confirmed my impression of the poet as a man of steely principle – not a demagogue or a prig, as the description might suggest, but one unwilling to bend on matters of moral and artistic consequence. He was not by nature political but the 20th century conspired to force politics on him. With a few adjustments, Richard Holmes’ description of Shelley the arch-Romantic, of all people, applies with fair precision to Herbert the arch-anti-Romantic:

“…a writer in the most comprehensive sense: poet, essayist, dramatist, pamphleteer, translator, reviewer and correspondent. He was moreover a writer who moved everywhere with a sense of ulterior motive, a sense of greater design, an acute feeling for the historical moment and an overwhelming consciousness of his duty as an artist in the immense and fiery process of social change of which he knew himself to be a part.”

For “social change” read its opposite, individual autonomy. Herbert is among those writers – like the Samuels, Johnson and Beckett – who make, at least while you’re reading them, much of the rest of literature seem less essential, almost trivial. Their words peer back at us, weighing our worth, and we strive to be worthy by the seriousness of our attention. In “Beginning to Remember” (from A Defense of Ardor), a memoir of Herbert’s centrality to his life, fellow-Pole Adam Zagajewski, writes:

“The hard, very hard life and the radiant clarity of the poetry; the contrast was striking. But Herbert never would have written – as William Styron did, for example – a confessional book on his depression. This choice was both personal and part of the cultural tradition he endorsed. He took classicism to mean: Don’t complain. This is precisely the point of his brief poem `Why the Classics.’ In the depths of despair he wrote another lovely poem, `Old Masters,’ in which he marvels at the anonymous restraint of the Italian Gothic painters. No, he couldn’t write `American-style,’ he couldn’t acknowledge his `problems,’ share his personal cares with his readers.”

And for that, we who detest the virulent narcissism that dominates much American writing, honor him. Sample these oblique, stringent lines from the poems Zagajewski cites. First, from “Why the Classics” (translated by Peter Dale Scott and the late Czeslaw Milosz):

“if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity
what will remain after us
will it be lovers' weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wall-paper dawns”

And these, the opening lines of “Old Masters” (translated by Alissa Valles):

“The Old Masters
did without names

“their signatures were
the white fingers of the Madonna”

Go here for a video memorial to Herbert (in Polish), and enjoy the Mozart. And here for an audio recording of Herbert reading one of his Mr. Cogito poems (also in Polish). This is the first time I’ve heard Herbert’s voice, which Zagajewski describes as “astonishing in its intensity, a deep, strong, beautiful voice, well modulated – although not at all artificial, theatrical in the negative sense…” In the same essay Zagajewski writes:

“Like several other great poets in this historical moment, Herbert stood before Evil and Beauty – the demon and the divinity, two riddles linked by nothing, that create no order when taken together, but likewise provide no illumination when considered separately.”