'Poor Naked Wretches, Whereso’er You Are'

Aleksander Wat (1900-67) was a Polish poet and one-time Communist hounded and imprisoned by Nazis and Soviets alike. In 1964 while visiting California, he recorded lengthy conversations with fellow poet and Pole Czesław Miłosz. The transcripts were translated by Richard Lourie and published in 1988 as My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. His oral memoir is an essential document from the bloodiest century in history. I put it on the same shelf as Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs and Whittaker Chambers’ Witness. In 1967, broken mentally and physically, Wat committed suicide in France. 

In Chap. 22 of My Century, Wat describes his experiences in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1941. How does one retain his aesthetic and spiritual capacities while in the grip of organized terror? Stalin’s Moscow in 1941 is among the worst times and places in history, yet Wat’s account mingles gratitude, wonder and intellectual vitality, suggesting he belongs to that endangered species, a complete human being. As a prisoner he reads Machiavelli and Proust, hears Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion on the radio, and writes:

 

“[T]he books I read in Lubyanka made for one of the greatest experiences of my life. Not because they allowed me an escape but because, to a certain extent, they transformed me, influenced and shaped me greatly. It was the way I read those books; I came at them from a completely new angle. And from then on I had a completely new understanding, not only of literature, but of everything.

 

“Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic. Naked, weak, hungry, trembling, endangered by all the elements, all the beasts and demons, the cave men performed that act of heroism for consolation, in the deepest sense of the word. And at that time there in Lubyanka this seemed to me the essence of literature and the source of its legitimacy in the world. Consolation for a weak, naked cave man.”

 

Wat’s cave man sounds a lot like Lear on the heath:

 

“Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,

And show the heavens more just.”

 

Wat, who was Jewish, converted to Catholicism, though he never repudiated his Jewishness. His subsequent thinking, once political and artistically avant-garde, matured and turned spiritual. Wat insists he was “passive toward religion,” then writes:

 

“But my life, oh, my life, had been a constant search for an enormous dream in which my fellow creatures and animals, plants, chimeras, stars, and minerals were in a pre-established harmony, a dream that is forgotten because it must be forgotten, and is sought desperately, and only sporadically does one find its tragic fragments in the warmth of a person, in some specific situation, a glance -- in memory too, of course, in some specific pain, some moment. I loved that harmony with a passion; I loved it in voices, voices. And then, instead of harmony, there was nothing but scraps and tatters. And perhaps that alone is what it means to be a poet.”

 

Wat was born on this date, May 1, in 1900, and died at age sixty-seven in 1967.