'Lighter Than a Hummingbird's Feather'

Czesław Miłosz wrote “In Warsaw” in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II:

“I did not want to love so.

That was not my design.

I did not want to pity so.

That was not my design.

My pen is lighter

Than a hummingbird's feather. This burden

Is too much for it to bear.

How can I live in this country

Where the foot knocks against

The unburied bones of kin?”

Few Americans have earned the right to speak so intimately and with such authority of war and its impact on writers and others. Most of us know war from newspapers and books. Boys enjoy playing Army. I remember visiting Gettysburg for the first time with my family when I was ten. My brother and I ran around as though the battlefield were a theme park or “interactive” museum. I’m certain we gave no thought to the 51,000 American casualties suffered in three days in 1863.

 

Not long ago I read a poem about an atrocity in Latin America written by an American: pure propaganda, composed at a safe distance. Political posturing. A poet who wants to be recognized as a moral exemplar. Utterly unconvincing as a moral document. Unlike Miłosz’s poem, there was something morbid about the American’s, as though the poet were relishing a chance to write about an act of depravity. Miłosz concludes his poem:

 

“It's madness to live without joy

And to repeat to the dead

Whose part was to be gladness

Of action in thought and in the

Only two salvaged words:

Truth and justice.”

 

In a 2009 interview, another Polish poet, the late Adam Zagajewski, said of “In Warsaw”: “Milosz avoids mournful ritual and says that living without happiness is madness. The charm of the world is the poet's obligation. When we stop naming the world, it disowns us and then we are only left with empty rhetoric, a hollow sound. A sense of humour must be combined with the sense of happiness that Milosz vindicates. A great poem is a model for life which influences our experience, albeit delicately.”

'The Circle Is Complete'

Perhaps it’s age but I find growing satisfaction in resolution. I like stories that conclude satisfyingly, often ending where they started, with the distance covered in between being the important part. I feel the same way about most music. You can keep the dissonance, chords that leave you hanging. I’ve grown more aware of cycles. Not cosmic. More prosaic than that – the migration of birds, the hustle of squirrels in the fall, kids returning to school. There’s a Scriptural subtext to Bill Coyle’s “Autumn” (The God of This World to His Prophet, 2006): 

“Harvest time. The circle is complete.

Time to crush the ripened fruit for wine.

Time to grind the gathered grain for bread.

 

“Tru to form, the geese pass overhead,

Giving us the ‘V for Victory’ sign

Even as they beat their long retreat.”

 

When he was seven years old (he is now thirty-nine), I took my oldest son to a nature preserve near Albany, N.Y., where the rangers were leading a twilight walk into the marshes to witness the spectacle of frog courtship. The frogs were Hyla crucifer, peepers the size of postage stamps with a pattern of ill-defined crosses on their backs. In April, males serenade females – a more reliable gauge of spring’s imminence than the return of the robins. At that latitude, spring returns incrementally.

 

We carried flashlights, fifteen or twenty of us, and approached the booming in the night. Though tiny, peepers en masse, thousands of them, are almost deafening. Even when we shined our lights on them, to watch their throats balloon as they called, they ignored us. Everyone laughed, out of amusement and astonishment.

 

Then another, more raucous sound began, impossibly, to drown out the peepers. It was past sunset, black without the flashlights. Directly overhead, flying no more than 25 feet off the ground, a flock of Canada geese honked like drunken saxophonists. In the dark, I felt privileged, disoriented and a little scared (the combined volume of frogs and birds was overwhelming). The darkness and the noise created an illusion of closeness, as though we were indoors, and again everyone, kids and grownups, laughed.

 

In Walden, Thoreau described “the circling groping clangor of some solitary goose.” Multiply that by dozens, and add the steady basso of the peepers. His journal is filled with references to frogs, including the genus Hyla, but he made relatively few observations of geese. Concord, Mass., is at the same latitude as Albany. On April 30, 1852, he followed the sound of the peepers and noted:

 

“It seemed to be a note of alarm. I caught one – It proved to be two coupled. They remained together in my hand. This sound has connexion with their loves probably.”

 

The bachelor Thoreau on the sex life of amphibians: “their loves probably.”

'A Very Peculiar Sorrow Attacks Me'

The feuilleton is an attractively flexible form, part journalism, part essay, that has seldom successfully crossed the Atlantic. The name is derived from the French feuillet, meaning the leaf of a book. Though spawned in France, the feuilleton achieved mastery among German-language writers, specifically Austrian, more specifically Viennese, even more specifically Jewish. Among its most accomplished practitioners are Alfred Polgar, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg and Egon Friedell. 

Clive James described the feuilleton as “a demanding genre that reached a high state of development in Vienna.” A minor literary critic named Hitler snuffed out the tradition, which has never fully recovered. Another practitioner, better known in the Anglophone world (thanks largely to the translations of Michael Hofmann), is the great novelist Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March (1932).

 

On October 31, 1926, in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Roth published “How does it look in the Russian street?” (trans. Zachary Suri), a feuilleton based on his recent visit to the Soviet Union. Historians will make much of the date, as 1926 is the year Stalin consolidated his power. He had achieved “Socialism in One Country.” The Revolution was nearly a decade old. Unlike many Western visitors to the Soviet Union – Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Dreiser, H.G. Wells, among others – Roth was not seduced by the charms of the Workers’ Paradise. His tone is resolutely unpolitical. He sees people, not politics:

 

“. . . I find the Russian street gray. The masses that people it are gray. It engulfs the red of the scarves, of the banners, of the insignia, and the golden reflection of the church roofs. They are a truly poor and haphazardly dressed people. A great earnestness wafts from them, overpowering in its soberness, pathetic in its poverty.”

 

What Roth misses is the spontaneity of life in a free country. In the Soviet Union he observes little joy, much humorlessness, little sense of life lived for its own sake, few children or animals, no evidence of celebratory improvisation. He concludes:

 

“I confess, ashamed, that in these streets, sometimes a very peculiar sorrow attacks me. In the middle of my admiration for a world which out of its own force—with more ecstasy than material, without money and without friends—prints newspapers, writes books, builds machines and factories, digs canals, after they just barely buried their dead—in the middle of this admiration, a homesickness seizes me for our frivolity and our damnability, a yearning for the aroma of civilization, a sweet aching for our scientifically-already-extinguished decadence. A childish, stupid, but fervent wish to see once again a fashion show at Molyneux, a lovely evening gown on a silly girl, a number of ‘Sourire,’ and the whole downfall of the occident: probably this is a bourgeois atavism.”

'Anything But Superficial'

Charles Lamb in a letter to his childhood friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge on October 30, 1809: 

“I have put up shelves. You never saw a book-case in more true harmony with the contents, than what I’ve nailed up in a room, which, though new, has more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see—as one sometimes gets a friend in the middle of life, who becomes an old friend in a short time. My rooms are luxurious; one is for prints and one for Books; a Summer and Winter parlour.”

 

First, savor Lamb’s metaphor about friendship. He’s right. Most date from childhood or early adulthood. One of life’s great rewards is a friend made later in life – so unexpected and likelier to be based in something substantial and lasting, not mere proximity.

 

In 1823, Leigh Hunt published “My Books” in The Examiner. He describes Lamb’s (“C.L.”’s) books: “I believe I did mention his book-room to C. L., and I think he told me that he often sat there when alone. It would be hard not to believe him. His library, though not abounding in Greek or Latin (which are the only things to help some persons to an idea of literature), is anything but superficial.” Hunt goes on to log a tempting assortment of authors:

 

“It looks like what it is, a selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls,—now a Chaucer at nine and twopence, now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings, now a Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza, an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney, and the books are “neat as imported.” The very perusal of the backs is a “discipline of humanity.” There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old Radical friend: there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden: there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewell . . .”

 

Lamb’s tastes were admirably excellent and eclectic. He was a dedicated habitué of London’s book-stalls. My experience is confined to les bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris. The idea of books exposed to sunlight and rain makes me nervous. Lamb had no such misgivings. His Dickensian celebration of London’s charms and of urban living in general, in the letter he wrote to Thomas Manning on November 28, 1800, includes the book-stalls:

 

“Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of ‘Fire!’ and ‘Stop, thief!’ inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, ‘Jeremy Taylors,’ ‘Burtons on Melancholy,’ and ‘Religio Medicis’ on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins! O City abounding in--, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!”

'Be Faithful Go'

J.J. Kimche writes in his most recent edition of The Jew from Nowhere, “Who Shall Sway Over the Trees?”: 

“One of the abiding oddities of my seven years in the United States has been the extraordinary disparity between the calibre of the American people and that of their political representatives. Every day, I encounter Americans who are serious, competent, conscientious and, above all, comparatively normal. I’m talking about the sort of chaps who go about their business calmly, hold the elevator for strangers, and demonstrate a reassuring capacity for rational thought and civil disagreement. Yet, through some mysterious political alchemy, scarcely any of these admirable creatures ever find their way onto a ballot.”

 

Kimche confirms one of my long-held convictions: we seldom elect people to public office who are worthy of us. Years ago I interviewed the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who told me he loved and respected our country but we had no talent for electing good presidents. Subsequent years haven’t altered the accuracy of his observation, which he delivered apologetically. Which reminds of one of the last century’s great moral testaments: Zbigniew Herbert’s 1974 poem “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” (trans. Bogdana and John Carpenter, Mr. Cogito, 1993), which includes these lines:  

 

“be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

in the final account only this is important”

 

And these:

 

“and do not forgive truly it is not in your power

to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

 

“beware however of unnecessary pride

keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror

repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I”

 

And in conclusion:

 

“and they will reward you with what they have at hand

with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

 

“go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls

to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

 

“Be faithful Go”

 

In his reverence for honor and conscience, Herbert reminds me of another Polish-born writer, Joseph Conrad, in Nostromo: “Government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind.”

 

Herbert was born on this date, October 29, in 1924, and died in 1998 at age seventy-three.

'I Don't Look for Novelty'

"Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic. Naked, weak, hungry, trembling, endangered by all the elements, all the beasts and demons, the cave men performed that act of heroism for consolation, in the deepest sense of the word. And at that time there in Lubyanka this seemed to me the essence of literature and the source of its legitimacy in the world. Consolation for a weak, naked cave man.” 

Aleksander Wat (1900-67), a poet who wrote middling avant-garde poems in Polish, also “spoke” one of the last century’s essential books (along with Solzhenitsyn’s, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s, Whittaker Chambers’ and Vasily Grossman’s): My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, edited and translated into English in 1988 by Richard Lourie from transcripts of conversations Wat had late in life with Czesław Miłosz. He wrote as a witness.

 

On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Nazi Germany had invaded the country from the west. The invasions had been secretly agreed upon less than a month earlier with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in the summer of 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. Wat would spend two years in Soviet prisons and camps, including the notorious Lubyanka in Moscow.

 

Good news: New York Review Books is soon to publish the coded diary kept by Wat, decrypted by his wife, Ola Watowa (1903-91), and translated by Alissa Valles, who has already given us Zbigniew Herbert, Józef Czapski and Ryszard Krynicki. Book Post has published an excerpt. Following a stroke in 1953, Wat suffered from chronic pain, often cited as his cause of death by suicide in 1967. Wat writes:

 

“The only thing that gives me a sense of safety, is when a new life situation, an accidental configuration of things, persons, words, gestures, recognizes itself in identical images and comparisons of what has already been. This is the one thing I need, I of all people, once an adventuristic ex-avant-gardist: to know, touch, feel that what is has already been, that what I am experiencing in this moment has already been experienced and survived, that therefore it is within human power, and therefore within my power, to survive it.”

 

And this: “Because of today’s rules in poetry, today’s lack of rules, today’s elements—how else? I’m not a scribe or an antiquarian—I don’t look for novelty but rather for the continuous authentication of new arrangements of things, words, rhythms that have already been experienced many times. Nihil novi is not my philosophy, it is my shield, for in the new there is a terrifying meaning, in new nonexistence, since the “new,” insofar as it is new, has arisen from nothing.” 

 

Wat's fluency, the articulation of his memories and intellectual linkages, his gift for sheer storytelling, are phenomenal for a man in his sixties in chronically ill health, ravaged by the century he endured. In section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998), Geoffrey Hill writes:

 

"Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.

Lumen is a measure of light.

Lumens are not luminaries. A great

Polish luminary of our time is the obscure

Aleksander Wat."

 

Wat illuminates our dark age with luminous words.

'Pass Judgment on Only What He Understands'

“Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. . . . You are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.” 

What little I’ve ever known and understood seems to be dissolving. I can still name all the presidents, in order, and the capitals of every state. But I haven’t a clue as to AI, the midterm elections or what to do about Russia. There was a time when, if I had no intelligent answers to such questions, I would have bluffed my way through them. Answering questions was not a quest for truth but an exercise in ego-massaging.

 

The passage above is taken from the letter Anton Chekhov wrote to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin on October 27, 1888. Suvorin had an earnest streak. Like many people today, his choice of politics seemed to be performative. He conformed to the fashions of his set. Chekhov writes:

 

“I sometime preach heresies, but haven’t once gone so far as to deny that problematic questions have a place in art. In conversations with my fellow writers I always insist that it is not the artist’s job to try to answer narrowly specialized questions. It is bad for the artist to take on something he doesn’t understand. . . . The artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is as limited as that of any other specialist . . .”

 

I’ve never read a work of literature, whether novel or poem, looking for answers, though they have occasionally been supplied without me seeking them.

 

[Chekhov’s quotes are taken from Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Simon Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim, 1973).]