'That Judgment Day of Man’s Illusions'

In 1956, The American Scholar asked forty-three writers, critics and scholars to name the book published in the preceding twenty-five years they believed to have been “the most undeservedly neglected.” For this reader, sorry to say, most of them remain neglected. I don’t even recognize most of the authors and titles nominated. An exception is Henry Roth and his 1934 novel Call it Sleep. Leslie Fiedler and Alfred Kazin both cited it, and four years later the novel was back in print. Fiedler says in his comment: 

“For sheer virtuosity, Call It Sleep is hard to beat; no one has ever distilled such poetry and wit from the counterpoint between the maimed English and the subtle Yiddish of  the immigrant. No one has reproduced so sensitively the terror of family life in the imagination of a child caught between two cultures. To let another year go by without reprinting it would be unforgivable.”

 

I first read it in 1970 and a copy still sits on my shelf. In his reply, Aldous Huxley is honest enough to confess he can’t think of a book “undeservedly neglected,” without quite admitting that most books deserve to be neglected.

 

One entry is worth recognizing. Ernest J. Simmons, whom I know solely as a biographer of Chekhov, nominates The Captive Mind (1953) by the great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Simmons writes that it “elicited only a gentle moan in American intellectual circles when it appeared, yet it studied with deep wisdom and illuminated with penetrating poetic insight one of the central problems of our age – the extraordinarily successful attempt to subdue the free artistic spirit to the pseudoscientific method of dialectical materialism.” In other words, Marxism and its ideological mutation, Marxist-Leninism as honed by Stalin. Keep in mind Simmons is writing in 1956 (the year of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), when many on the Left in the U.S. and elsewhere remained seduced by the lure of totalitarianism. Simmons goes on:

 

“Milosz brilliantly analyzes the ruthless yet often subtle means by which this end is achieved, as well as the courageous efforts of some to preserve a modicum of artistic independence and still continue to exist. Further, he justly criticizes the rational attempts to oppose this enslavement of the arts which have been made by Western intellectuals who fail to realize that one does not defeat a messiah with common-sense arguments.”

 

Here is the book's best-known passage -- part autobiographical epiphany, part first-person polemic -- in Miłosz’s “undeservedly neglected book”:

 

“A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. Let us suppose, too, that a certain poet was the hero of the literary cafes, and wherever he went was regarded with curiosity and awe. Yet his poems, recalled in such a moment, suddenly seem diseased and highbrow. The vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real, and poetry based on an equally naked experience could survive triumphantly that judgment day of man’s illusions.”

 

In her excellent 2021 volume A California Life: Czesław Miłosz, Cynthia Haven describes The Captive Mind as “one long exhalation of grief and denunciation.”