`He Will Be the City'

I’ve been reading Zbigniew Herbert for a month or so and will post my review of The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 when it’s published, but I’m still analyzing the reasons I esteem his work. It’s humane yet almost never sentimental. It’s learned and draws from history, painting, music, mythology and philosophy, as well as literature. Herbert’s preoccupations are ethical and he has a Pole’s sensitivity to history. He seems to view it as an endless series of interchangeable templates – different players, different geography, same nightmare. Moral progress, the notion that we as a species learn long-term lessons from the past, is a naïve, dangerous delusion. In an interview published in The Manhattan Review in 1984, Herbert was asked when he lost his faith in reform:

“I have known this since September 20, 1939. When I came into contact with the Soviets in Lwów, as a boy. I cannot stop wondering at certain intellectuals. I had my revelations ab oculos. And not through Marx or Lenin. The city was changed within a few days into a concentration camp. This system attacks a European through smells and tastes; while I am a partisan of goodness and beauty, I don't have a model for the happiness of humanity. My advice is: compare the smell, the state of the street, people's eyes, as I did in 1939.”

Two volumes of Herbert’s essays in English have been published -- The Barbarian in the Garden and Still Life with a Bridle. In the former is “Albigensians, Inquisitors and Troubadours,” which seems as pertinent to the 21st century as to the 13th and 20th. Here’s the essay’s concluding paragraphs:

“Soldiers built a huge stake at the foot of a mountain, in a place now called `Cramatches’ – from prat dels crematz, the field of those who were burned. Dry wood at that time of year is scarce, so instead of the usual construction of twigs and poles to which the condemned were tied, they built a palisade strewn with a thick layer of brushwood. They pushed the chained Albigensians into this horrible enclosure. The palisade was set alight from all sides. The wounded and the sick were thrown inside. The heat was so intense that witnesses had to retreat from the pyre. The singing of the clergy and the moaning of the dying merged.

“At night, when human bodies still smouldered, three Albigensians hiding in the cellars of Montségur sneaked out and lowered themselves down the vertical cliff. They carried away the remaining treasure, the holy books, and their testimony to martyrdom.

“Heavy, nauseating smoke descends into the valleys and spreads across history.”

The slaughter of the Cathars (also known as Albigensians) occurred in southern France, near the Pyrenees, on March 16, 1244. Herbert’s essay was published in book form in 1962. It was written by a poet who was 15 in 1939, when the Soviets invaded Lwow, which later was captured by the Nazis, then re-captured by the Soviets. Herbert fought in the underground. The holocaust in which some 200 Cathars were slaughtered echoes with Herbert’s knowledge of the infinitely great crimes of the Holocaust and the Soviet murder of millions. If there is any hope in Herbert’s account, any sense that something of value survived, it’s in his mention of the three Albigensians who escape with “the remaining treasure, the holy books” – that is, with the gifts of civilization. This echoes three lines from Herbert’s great poem, “Report from a Beseiged City,” written after Wojciech Jaruzelski’s neo-Stalinist crackdown in December 1981. The hope is attenuated but real:

“and if the City falls and one man survives
he will carry the City inside him on the paths of exile
he will be the City”