'A Precondition of Writing'

“[Zbigniew] Herbert, a great believer in the continuity of human life and experience throughout history, walked out into the light of day after visiting the prehistoric caves at Lascaux and wrote: ‘Though I have stared into what some call the abyss of history, I did not feel I was returning from another world.’” 

Eric Karpeles is writing in Almost Nothing: The 20^th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski (New York Review Books, 2018). The painter/writer and the poet, both Poles, both survivors of Nazism and Soviet Communism, first met in Paris in 1958, two years after Herbert published his first book of poems, Chords of Light. Karpeles describes him as “a discerning and thoughtful poet and essayist with an exacting eye and enormous erudition.” After much bureaucratic wrangling, Herbert had obtained from the Polish Ministry of Culture a grant to travel in England, Italy and France – “on a pauper’s budget and often under surveillance,” Karpeles notes.

 

The eventual product of his visit to Western Europe was a collection of essays, Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985). Karpeles is quoting above from the volume’s first essay, “Lascaux.” Herbert describes his tour of the caves in southwestern France where Paleolithic paintings were discovered in 1940, three months after the fall of France. History permeates everything Herbert wrote. (Guy Davenport notes: “Heraclitus, like the paintings at Lascaux, like the eloquent fragments of Sappho and Archilochos, has survived and thus become timeless.”)

 

In 1958, Czapski painted a memorable portrait of Herbert seated at a table, reading. The figure in the painting, with a pen beside him, is “a contemplative and a lover of books.” Karpeles continues:

 

“Flipping distractedly through the book’s pages, perhaps thinking before reaching for the pen, he might be poised to write something, or he may simply be reading. These two activities are only tenuously separated for writers. . . . Czapski’s portrait suggests distraction and focus, the mental activity of a writer preparing to write, a moment rarely captured in paint.”

 

Barbarian in the Garden is on my short list of essential books. Herbert begins “Lascaux” with a spirited, unexpected digression: “Breakfast in a small restaurant, but what a breakfast! An omelette with truffles. Truffles belong to the world history of human folly, hence to the history of art. So a word about truffles.” This is a man temporarily freed from the grim, gray strictures of the Soviet Bloc. He devotes the next two paragraphs to an entertaining account of truffle history and gastronomy. On to Lascaux, with Herbert’s wit as our guide:

 

“The cold, electric light is hideous, so we can only imagine the Lascaux cave when the living light of torches and crests set into motion the herds of bulls, bison and deer on the walls and vault. In addition, the guide’s voice stammering explanations. A sergeant reading the Holy Scriptures.”

 

The first scientist to visit the Lascaux caves after their discovery was Henri Breuil, an immensely learned Roman Catholic priest, archaeologist and anthropologist. Herbert uses a sentence from Breuil as the epigraph to “Lascaux”: “If Altamira [in Spain, the site of cave paintings discovered in 1868] is the capital of cave paintings, then the Lascaux Cave is its Versailles.”

 

Unlike many writers, Herbert possessed the gift of imaginative projection. Little that was human, regardless of time or space, was alien to him. In Polish Writers on Writing (ed. Adam Zagajewski, 2007), Herbert says in an interview:

 

“I had the feeling that my individuality was not absolute, certain, finished, that it was by an accident that I was born into the Herbert family. I could have been that child in the courtyard with whom I played, that daughter of the Jewish shopkeeper with whom I was so in love–she was my first love. Here we return to empathy, which for me is something completely natural and even, let’s say, a precondition of writing.”

 

Herbert died on this date, July 28, in 1998, at age seventy-three.