`Consolation for a Weak, Naked Cave Man'

When I take my access to books for granted – my own, the public library, my university library, inter-library loan, bookstores, generous book editors – I remember Aleksander Wat. After the German-Soviet partition of Poland, and despite his naïve sympathy for Communism, the Polish poet was arrested and confined to Soviet prisons in Lwow and Kiev, and the notorious Lubyanka in Moscow. Apart from all the horrors known and unknown he faced, Wat must have dreaded a bookless fate. He was surprised to learn that Lubyanka prisoners were permitted books and other reading matter, but nothing by Marx, Lenin or the others whose system had confined them. In My Century, his memoir in the form of transcribed interviews with Czeslaw Milosz, Wat explained:

“My fellow prisoners had a very intelligent explanation for that: it was simply to keep the investigators, who were not terribly intelligent, from being nailed to the wall by Marxist arguments.”

Wat read the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, St. Augustine and other church fathers, and said:

“…the books I read in Lubyanka made for one of the greatest experiences of my life. Not because they allowed me an escape but because, to a certain extent, they transformed me, influenced and shaped me greatly. It was the way I read those books; I came at them from a completely new angle. And from then on I had a completely new understanding, not only of literature, but of everything.

“Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic. Naked, weak, hungry, trembling, endangered by all the elements, all the beats 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.”

Wat’s cave men sound like Lear on the heath:

“Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.”

When Wat speaks of consolation, I think of Geoffrey Hill’s question in The Triumph of Love: “What ought a poem to be?” “Answer, a sad and angry consolation.”

The first book Wat read in prison after a bookless year was Swann’s Way, the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu:

“…I was more charmed than ever by the power of its energy, its beauty of movement. The poetry in Swann’s Way made everything intimate, an `inward vibration,” and was all the more unusual in that it played off the outermost layers, the epidermis of the sensibility. And what was of more importance to me was that in its experience of time past, the book was, first and foremost, a state of constant agony in which nothing had yet died but everything was dying. An unbroken moment suspended between life and death, a final breath hellishly protracted beyond all measure – it is that alone that gives the book its depth and stirs the reader to his depth; without this, Proust’s entire work would be no more than an enormous fresco of vanity, in both senses of the word. While reading Swann’s Way, I began to discover a model for the agony I was suffering in prison, and Proust’s long sentences and time periods recaptured their original power for me. An exchange of form and power – the archetypal relationship between author and reader.”

The best books give us models for agony, yes, but also for exultation, compassion, wit, humility and all possible human qualities. Bookless, I would not be alone, for I have family and friends, but I would feel more alone than Crusoe before he met Friday.