`Picking His Way Through Chaos'

In The Offensive Traveller, V.S. Pritchett gives a memorable description of his first visit to Poland, some time in the early nineteen-sixties. In Warsaw, he arranges a rendezvous with a Polish journalist on a city square, “a cold Stalinist construction of windy arcades,” only to see two middle-aged men behaving peculiarly:

“[They were] playing hide-and-seek with each other in the arcades, popping their heads out and calling `Bo!’ to each other. At last, exhausted, they stopped, said a few parting words, kissed each other on the lips, and went off. My young friend glanced at them as I got on the back of his scooter.

“`Everyone in Poland is mad,’ he shouted over his shoulder as we shot off across the city.
`Anything can happen here. Anything can be said. You can do anything that comes into your head.’”

This is not how many Westerners – in Gomulka’s day or ours – imagine Poland. But such anarchic playfulness will not surprise readers of recent Polish literature. In the work of Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska and Adam Zagajewski, anything can happen, though the result is seldom self-indulgent or cute. This fun-loving Polish spirit mingled with high seriousness shows up in “Dangerous Considerations: A Notebook,” a selection of prose by Zagajewski in the October issue of Poetry. Here’s how it teasingly opens:

“I won't tell you everything. Since nothing's really happening. I represent, moreover, the Eastern European school of discretion: we don't discuss divorces, we don't admit depressions. Life proceeds peacefully on all fronts; beyond the window, a gray, exceptionally warm December.”

To my taste, Zagajewski’s prose delivers more sustenance than his poetry. In the latter I sense the influence of a certain strain of contemporary American poem – whimsical, ironic, sensitive and self-regarding. In his prose, these impulses are usually absent or moderated by Zagajewski’s learning, seriousness and willingness to be sincere. In English, four prose collections are available: Solidarity, Solitude (1990), Two Cities (1995), Another Beauty (2000) and A Defense of Ardor (2004). The blog-like notebook excerpts published in Poetry range from gossip and bookchat to miniature essays on Shostakovich, Gottfried Been, Yehuda Amichai, Göran Sonnevi , Ted Hughes, Schubert, Gershom Scholem and Robert Musil. He tells us that Milosz, in his final years, “studied” the Harry Potter novels. Why?

“To see what the children are reading now, what draws the very young, what this says about an evolving world. He accepted Harry Potter with good humor. There's nothing wrong with it, he'd say in his baritone.”

Zagajewski, who has been reading Karl Corino’s biography of Musil, says of Milosz:

“He was far closer to [Thomas] Mann than to Musil. It wasn't Moglichkeitssinn that excited him, not the sense of possibility, but only what actually existed. It's not that he lacked for mystical appetites in his writing — but his mysticism fed upon the real, it rose on the yeast of reality. He was a shark in his long poems. And a shark in his reading; he devoured theology, philosophy, poetry, and history. I think about this sometimes when meeting young poets, on both sides of the Atlantic. They often give the impression that they're interested only in the most recent issue of the choicest poetry journals. As if poetry weren’t, inter alia, an answer to a world that expresses itself in a thousand different forms, through the sorrow of the unemployed man sitting in the park on a fine April day as well as symphonies or philosophical tracts.”

I referred earlier to Zagajewski’s willingness to be sincere, to resist the kneejerk irony that afflicts so many writers today. In one passage he addresses this aspect of his artistic strategy and the unfavorable responses it has inspired:

“I seem to be one of the last authors, not counting theologians, to refer now and then to the notion of a `spiritual life.’ In our day, we confine ourselves at the best of times to discussing the imagination. The word `imagination’ is beautiful and vast, but it doesn't hold everything. Some people look at me suspiciously for this very reason; they think I must be a reactionary, or a double-dyed conservative at the very least. I open myself to ridicule. Progressive circles condemn me, or at least look at me askance. Conservative enclaves likewise fail to understand what I'm talking about. Poets a generation younger keep their distance. Only a certain young Spanish poet told me in Barcelona that my essays perhaps signal that postmodern irony may yet be conquered one day. But what is the spirit, the spiritual life? If only I were up to defining such things! Robert Musil says that the spirit synthesizes intellect and emotion. It's a good working definition, for all its concision.”

For insight into Poland and Polish writing, particularly the work of Herbert (who, unlike Milosz, never emigrated), listen to what a young waiter in Warsaw told Pritchett some 45 years ago:

“The great mistake you Westerners make about us is that you think we are enslaved by a rigidly organized system from which one cannot escape. But the truth is that there is no real system. There is a state of continual disorder. Planners make small miscalculations which lead to enormous mistakes. And the ordinary man spends a lot of his time picking his way through chaos.”