America, by Way of Poland

Zbigniew Herbert led me to Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish writer I hadn’t previously known, who by way of a notebook chronicling his visit to the United States has led me back to Zbigniew Herbert. Circularity makes for reliable navigation.

Tyrman was born in Poland in 1921. I know little about him except that he spent time in German and Soviet prisons during World War II, and was a journalist who worked for anti-regime newspapers in Soviet-era Poland. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1966, founded a conservative think tank and monthly journal, and died in 1985. I found his Notebooks of a Dilettante in the library. Most of its contents were first published in The New Yorker in the nineteen-sixties, including “American Diary.”

Tyrman arrived by ship in New York City in January 1966 – a pivotal American moment -- and traveled around the country. He is amazed by mundane realities the natives never notice. Most of the police officers he saw in Washington, D.C., for instance, were black, and they were armed. As a Pole, fed a steady diet of anti-American propaganda, he had no understanding of the Second Amendment or America’s racial complexity. His naïveté and honesty are touching:

“I never read in the Communist press that there were Negro policemen in America. Maybe I don’t really know anything about the Negro problem here?”

Like many foreign visitors, Tyrman is overwhelmed by American abundance and scale. He wills himself into accepting and trying to comprehend American reality. His openness is admirable, as is his refusal of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, still the default mode of so many European intellectuals. Tyrmand lights us when he arrives in Houston. He visits a Rotary meeting, a barbecue, the Astrodome, the University of Houston, a Pirandello production at the Alley Theatre, and the Manned Spacecraft Center, and all the while has a marvelous time. Even when he observes the American brand of poshlust, defined by Nabokov as the “falsely important, the falsely beautiful, falsely clever, the falsely attractive,” he never condescends. His instinct is to enjoy and understand. By seeing us clearly, he better understands himself and fellow Europeans:

“The most exhausting feature here is the method of communication. Americans ignore our general principle for communicating important matters – the rule that not all is said. There are things, mainly wishes, that we do not express but rather make felt. To Americans one has to speak directly. Allusion, which constitutes the only possibility of accepting before being asked or without having to ask, is unknown. If you want to be invited to an American’s home, you must tell him so – something that in Europe would be unthinkable.”

In miniature, Tyrmand describes the premise of The American and a dozen other novels and stories by Henry James: American bluffness and plain dealing versus European wiles and indirection. But he also offers insight into the aesthetic method of his friend Zbigniew Herbert: “There are things, mainly wishes, that we do not express but rather make felt.” Here’s a prose poem, “Angels of Civilization,” translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles:

“At the turn of the century it seemed that angels were leaving us forever and that every trace of them would be lost. They were still employed here and there by funeral services. They also held up unfashionable canopies. But essentially they went pale from inertia and slowly turned into pink powder.

“The real renaissance of angels came with the development of airline companies. You could say without exaggeration they came back to earth and took on the flush of life. They provide aid in crossing a footbridge hung high above the oceans. From the intercom systems of airports their high unreal voices trickle smoothly as if they wanted to persuade us there's still some salvation.

“They speak all tongues, but they have one laugh for ascension and catastrophe.”

As practiced by American poets, most prose poems are artfully incoherent and unpoetic. Herbert was a master of the form. In his hands it was fable-like, worthy of Kafka. To use Tyrmand’s distinction, “Angels of Civilization” makes much felt while overtly expressing little. The angels, so benign in folklore, so helpful through most of the poem, laugh inappropriately, when planes crash and civilizations fall. Here’s an excerpt from an interview Herbert gave The Manhattan Review that I have cited before, but it’s worth a reprise:

“Writing—and in this I disagree with everybody—must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. `Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don't like hope.”

An un-American but not anti-American sentiment.