Czesław Miłosz: A California Life – Cynthia L. Haven | #language & literature

Czesław Miłosz: A California Life – Cynthia L. Haven

‘Yet the majestic space of the Pacific coast imperceptibly penetrated my dreams, transforming me, depriving me and thus perhaps liberating me.’ This is how Czesław Miłosz wrote about the landscape of California, where he spent as many as four decades. This period in the poet’s life is the subject of a book by Cynthia L. Haven, ‘Czesław Miłosz: A California Life’.

Cynthia L. Haven, an American critic and literary scholar, has devoted no fewer than three books to Czesław Miłosz. In the latest of these, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life, she shows how the poet was influenced by his stay in Berkeley, as well as the impact he himself had on American literature. As the researcher points out in the first chapter:

I now hope to retell his story – or some of it, because his life was long – through an American lens, to put a spotlight on the elements downplayed or shortchanged by those looking at him with European eyes. Yes, he was a poet of witness, but he was much more beyond that, like a galaxy is beyond a single star. How had he changed because of us? And we because of him? How can we see his story through the point of view of another landscape, another people?

California as a place of exile

Haven does not limit her story to the 40 years the poet spent in California, but recreates his complicated life after World War II. ‘Miłosz’s long life saw several exiles, each an archaeological layer that gave definition and richness to his psychology – and they began long before he came to California’, she explains. In particular, she describes in detail his first stay in America, when, after the war, he left Poland under the communist regime as soon as possible, joining its diplomatic service to arrive in New York in January 1946. There, he took up the post of cultural and press officer at the consulate, and after less than a year was appointed cultural attaché in Washington. Haven tells a very interesting story of Miłosz’s ambivalent attitude to the United States – he criticised its inhabitants for their superficiality, but at the same time he was fascinated by American literature, which he introduced to Polish readers in his essays. While in New York, he tried to enter the local writing community and befriended the well-known playwright Thornton Wilder. In America, he was also enthralled by the wildlife (‘America for me has the pelt of a raccoon / Its eyes are a raccoon’s black binoculars. / A chipmunk flickers in a litter of dry bark [...]’). The timeless beauty and power of nature he experienced in the States, however, failed at the time to convince him to stay there. We can learn about Miłosz’s dilemmas from the book – Wilder urged him to flee, but Albert Einstein, for example, whom the poet had the opportunity to meet, warned against the fate of exile. The FBI, watching Miłosz closely, thought he would stay and ask for political asylum. However, the poet decided otherwise – he accepted an appointment in Paris, where he set off in September 1950, leaving his pregnant wife Janina and son Antoni in the USA. On arrival, he was under the impression that he was constantly being followed by the Security Bureau, and when he arrived in Warsaw in December, his passport was revoked. Having regained it with great difficulty, he returned to Paris:

On February 1, 1951, laden with suitcases, he stepped into a waiting taxi and was whisked away to the town of Maisons-Laffitte, about fourteen miles northwest of Paris. At great risk, he had turned his back on more than five years of service to the Communist government. He was the first writer and intellectual of such distinction to defect from the Soviet bloc, and the first to give his reasons publicly in a press conference, saying that a lie is the source of all crime and that ‘the paramount duty of a poet is to tell the truth’.

After his escape, Miłosz hid for three and a half months at the headquarters of the Paris-based journal Kultura. Almost immediately, he began feverishly writing one of his most famous works, The Captive Mind. His situation was not an easy one. Haven gives a very interesting account of the administrative and visa obstacles he faced in wanting to join his wife and sons in the United States. At the time, America was entering a period of McCarthyism and not only the FBI, but also the Polish émigré community in the States suspected Miłosz of being a ‘diehard communist’ and a Stalinist snitch. Miłosz’s wife Janina, who fought fiercely for her husband’s visa, one day told State Department officials: ‘You’ll regret it, because he’s going to win the Nobel Prize!’ In the end, however, she gave up and decided to leave with her sons and join her husband in France.

The invitation to the States came to Miłosz later – and in a way he had not expected at all. In 1959, Francis Whitfield, dean of Slavic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, invited him to give guest lectures there. Miłosz initially declined, but the dean, whose wife was an émigré from Poland, was persistent. He renewed the invitation the following year and this time received a positive response. In 1960, Miłosz, who was approaching 50, took up a position at the University of California. Teaching was a new experience for him, but he nevertheless excelled in the role, and his lectures formed the basis of the textbook The History of Polish Literature, published in 1969.

The Magic Mountain

After the difficult years in France, working in Berkeley proved to be Miłosz’s salvation. It provided him with stability and security and allowed him to create and publish freely. In 1962, he and his family moved into a house on Grizzly Peak overlooking San Francisco Bay, surrounded by majestic sequoias and wild deer coming to gnaw on the leaves in the garden. As Haven explains:

The Grizzly Peak address has more name recognition in Poland than in the United States; Miłosz’s cottage, looking like an illustration for a Brothers Grimm story, is a landmark for Polish literary pilgrims, but among Californians, the summit is known mostly for its hiking trails, its spectacular panoramas, and its flora and fauna. And that is the point: This was “natura” for him – it was a place seemingly impervious to history, a place of eternal return, the setting for every day he spent in Berkeley.

It was the wooden front door of the house on Grizzly Peak that Miłosz opened to photographers on the morning of 9th October 1980, when it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Prior to this, however, Miłosz had felt alienated, anonymous, unappreciated in California and saw it as a place of exile:

I did not choose California. It was given to me.
What can the wet north say to this scorched emptiness?

In time, however, a group of eminent translators – Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Lillian Vallee, Richard Lourie, Clare Cavanagh and others – formed around Miłosz, translating his works into English. The poet’s breakthrough came with the publication of the collection Bells in Winter by Ecco Press, run by Daniel Halpern, in 1978. Not only did the volume sell quickly in an edition of 20,000 copies, but it also found its way into the hands of members of the Nobel Committee. As Haven points out:

The paradox is that California’s greatest poet – and certainly one of America’s most important poets – was a Pole who wrote one and only one poem, ‘To Raja Rao’, in English. He admitted it himself: ‘In a certain sense, I’m an American poet, although it’s clear that all my poems are translated from the Polish.’

After 1989, Miłosz visited Poland with increasing frequency. The Nobel laureate and his second wife, Carol, divided their time between Berkeley and Kraków, a city that in 1993 granted the poet honorary citizenship and an apartment on Bogusławskiego Street. In 2000, they settled permanently in Poland. Miłosz made his last appearance in California at a memorial service in honour of Carol, who was more than 30 years his junior and who died in 2002. He later returned to Kraków, where he lived until his death two years later. Throughout his incredibly rich life, however, nowhere did he spend as much time as he did in Berkeley.

In her book, Haven fascinatingly outlines the often very subtle and non-obvious influence of California on the poet. She tries to trace how he was influenced not only by the landscapes there, but also by beatniks such as Allen Ginsberg, to whom he dedicated a poem, and later by the hippies, the Berkeley student revolt and other social and technological revolutions he witnessed there. Reflecting on how Miłosz’s career would have turned out without California, whether his work would have gained international acclaim and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, Haven states:

Surrounded by people of his own kind, a familiar audience, would he have explored the margins of loneliness, alienation, and abandonment? Not likely. The phenomenon we know as Czesław Miłosz had to come into being here, had to begin again here so he could fully embrace the world in his time. He had to be here so he could return there. How could he have been Miłosz without the Pacific, without this unique spot on it, the place that was his Patmos?

Cynthia L. Haven
Czesław Miłosz: A California Life
Heyday, Berkeley, California, 2021
Number of pages: 256
ISBN: 978-1597145497

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