`Literature Shares with Man His Solitude'

I had lunch on Monday with Ewa Thompson, a research professor in Slavic Studies at Rice University and a longtime friend of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. Last week, on a whim, I sent her a link to my review of Herbert’s The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 in the Philadelphia Inquirer. She wrote back to say that she, too, had reviewed the volume, had known Herbert since she was teenager in Poland, and had accepted the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing on his behalf in 1995, when he was too ill to receive it in person. Herbert died in 1998.

The Ingersoll Foundation has awarded its prize annually since 1983, and its winners have included Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Powell, Walker Percy, Muriel Spark, Geoffrey Hill – a more consistently deserving list that the largely discredited Nobel Prize for Literature. The award totaled $20,000, and Thompson said Herbert, who lived in near-poverty in Poland, gave away half the money.

Thompson was born 70 years ago in Poland, and immigrated to the United States in 1963. As a teenager, she wrote a fan letter to Herbert, and they continued to correspond and often met when Thompson visited Europe. Her books include Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism, Understanding Russia: the Holy Fool in Russian Culture, The Search for Self-Definition in Russian Literature, and the Twayne volume on Witold Gombrowicz. She edits Samaritan Review, a scholarly journal on the history, culture, and society of Central and Eastern Europe.

Like many natives of the Soviet Bloc, Thompson’s thinking is dominated by hatred of Communism. Her love of Herbert’s work is driven more by politics and history than aesthetics, and she calls him “Our Knight in Shining Armor.” She gave me a copy of Herbert’s acceptance speech for the T.S. Eliot Award, “Invisible but Present,” which she had translated into English and I had never read. In it, Herbert chronicles his encounters with Eliot’s work, starting with his teenage discovery of an early poem, “La Figlia che Piange,” on a page torn from an anthology:

“The first encounter did not take place in the silence of a library but in the midst of a raging war, with barbarism let loose. At that time, universities, libraries, museums seemed to belong to the world of mythology and fantasy rather than to everyday reality….It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast: the world of chaos and fury that surrounded me, and this poem in a soft and elegiac key, so abounding in delicacy and tenderness.”

As in his poetry, the tone of Herbert’s speech is at once cerebral and history-minded, yet oddly down-home and jargon-free. His virtues are the humblest of human virtues. The critic Al Alvarez put it this way in a 1985 review of the English translation of Report from the Besieged City:

“Herbert is the only contemporary poet I know who can talk about nobility and, more important, sound noble without also sounding false. It is a note that is rare in the arts of any period. The Romans had it, so did Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. But it hasn’t been much in evidence in recent years and perhaps it took someone who has witnessed close-up -- `with a calm and very clear eye’ – some of the worst horrors of this century to speak out for virtù and endurance without sounding sentimental.”

Herbert’s delicate sense of “nobility” is evident everywhere in his acceptance speech:

“I said I got acquainted with Eliot’s poem by chance, but on second thought this is not true; in fact, it would be blasphemous to say so. Even today, I strongly feel that this first poem was a gift, that it was bestowed on me by fate.

“Please forgive me if I speak un unfashionable language, one ill-adjusted to the analytical epoch in which we live. Yet I think that literature should not yield to the temptation of `keeping up with the times’ and genuflecting before the advances of scientific research. Literature is ruled by its own laws, and it disciplines itself according to its own rules; it addresses itself to the regions of the soul untouched by scholarly analysis. Words such as `progress’ and `advance,’ so ardently worshiped today, do not provide a key to literature. Such is my conviction, and also the justification for my work.”

Herbert, the most unostentatiously learned of poets, tells stories of Cicero, Wordsworth, Newton and Kant, and none of it feels like name-dropping, as it would from the lips of most writers. For Herbert, it always comes back to the human:

“Literature and its only subject matter, the only game it pursues: the human person. Literature has pursued this game for millennia. It keeps pulling out of the anonymous human mass an individual (always in the singular, never in the plural) to whom it gives the body and soul, face and character, and whom it leads through a certain course of events toward, perhaps, an immortality. It pursues that person’s earthly fate. It lights up the brief moment between two dark unknowns: before and after. It insists that the individual whose life it illuminates is unrepeatable, that he is a person, and thus different from anything else in the universe. It diligently researches that person’s virtues and trespasses, dreams and crimes. Sometimes it offers forgiveness, at other times it is unyielding and austere as if it itself had to answer for its judgments to a higher authority.

“Literature is down-to-earth, but it yields a sympathetic ear to dreams. It understands solitude and human solidarity. It holds sovereign power over time. T.S. Eliot expressed it best as he discovered the undercurrent of poetry under the pedestrian rules of grammar:

“`Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.’”

I can’t think of a less fashionable yet inarguable truth than this sentence from the end of Herbert’s speech:

“Literature shares with man his solitude and the urge to oppose evil.”