Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life

By Cynthia L. Haven

The first book about the Nobel Laureate's transformative but conflicted time in the Golden State.

"There is much to learn from this book about Miłosz and California, yes, but also about poetry and the world."—Ilya Kaminsky

Czesław Miłosz, one of the greatest poets and thinkers of the past hundred years, is not generally considered a Californian. But the Nobel laureate spent four decades in Berkeley—more time than any other single place he lived—and he wrote many of his most enduring works there. This is the first book to look at his life through a California lens. Filled with original research and written with the grace and liveliness of a novel, it is both an essential volume for his most devoted readers and a perfect introduction for newcomers.

Miłosz was a premier witness to the sweep of the twentieth century, from the bombing of Warsaw in World War II to the student protests of the sixties and the early days of the high-tech boom. He maintained an open-minded but skeptical view of American life, a perspective shadowed by the terrors he experienced in Europe. In the light of recent political instability and environmental catastrophe, his poems and ideas carry extra weight, and they are ripe for a new generation of readers to discover them. This immersive portrait demonstrates what Miłosz learned from the Golden State, and what Californians can learn from him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heyday
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781597145534

Cynthia L. Haven

Cynthia L. Haven writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and has contributed to publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today. She edited Czesław Miłosz: Conversations and An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz. She is also the author of Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, as well as a visiting writer and scholar at Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and a Voegelin Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In 2018 she was named a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, an award conferred for the purpose of researching and writing this book. Follow her on Twitter @chaven.

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1

CALIFORNIA CONSIDERED AS AN ISLAND

In the late 1970s, Mark Klus was raking leaves and twigs at Czesław Miłosz’s Berkeley home on Grizzly Peak. The former student of the Polish poet remembers him laughing, then explaining, If California is not a separate planet, it is at least a separate colony of the planet Earth.

What did he mean? California was not wholly the Earth, because it was like a prehistoric landscape where human activity and civilization had no place, and were completely dwarfed, Klus told me. There is an air of detachment in California—throughout the West, really. For this reason, I say California was a desert for Miłosz. He eventually developed a deep ambivalence toward the place—although what wasn’t Miłosz deeply ambivalent about?

Miłosz had expressed the same thought in a discussion of California in his Visions from San Francisco Bay: Our species is now on a mad adventure. We are flung into a world which appears to be a nothing, or, at best, a chaos of disjointed masses we must arrange in some order.1 That is from the English translation, but in the original Polish version, the phrase mad adventure is księżycowa przygoda, literally lunar adventure, which conveys not only the sense of lunacy but also explains Miłosz’s sense of California’s role as a colony, a place colonized by the rest of the Earth. Hence, its contradictions.

Miłosz, an oceanic thinker as well as writer, spent four decades of his life, the bulk of his literary career, here. He was an American citizen, an American writer, and an eminent professor at the University of California, Berkeley—and he is still its only Nobel Prize winner in the humanities. Yet his beginnings were far away, starting with his 1911 birth on his family’s Lithuanian manor, among the Polish-speaking gentry. His literary career took him to Warsaw and, after its destruction, to a diplomatic post in the United States, where he served the Stalinist government of Poland. He defected in Paris, and then, nearly a decade later, was invited to teach in California. With the birth of a free Poland, he repatriated and died in Kraków in 2004. He had a hybrid identity, despite himself.

The irony is that the greatest Californian poet—and certainly one of America’s greatest poets, too—could well be a Pole who wrote a single poem in English, To Raja Rao. He admitted so himself: In a certain sense, I’m an American poet, although it’s clear that all my poems are translated from the Polish.2 He is not read with the same earnestness he was after his 1980 Nobel, but the fault is ours, not his: You pay attention in a different way when reading Miłosz, said his publisher Daniel Halpern, perhaps commenting on the fact that, more than forty years out from that Nobel win, we are not living in an age noted for its long attention span.

California shaped Miłosz’s thinking, and in ways that we haven’t fully recognized or acknowledged. Perhaps the reason is that California itself is not understood. Its prominence in the nation is often reduced to a cliché, obscuring its real differences and its unique role in the nation and the world. To understand the importance of place for the Nobel poet, we have to defamiliarize the land we think we know, and also restore it to what it was when he first encountered it, as he began to discover America in the postwar years: the years before Silicon Valley was born, before the Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury social upheavals revolutionized a nation, before the wine industry had recovered from Prohibition and California cuisine had been invented—a time when hard liquor was still the universal social lubricant.

At first, his preoccupations, almost obsessions—history, language, civilization, time, and truth—seemed irrelevant in the place in which he had, half reluctantly, made his home. Yet over time, these two worlds, these two realities—California and Eastern Europe—reflected, illuminated, even interpenetrated each other. In doing so, they transfigured him from a poet writing from one corner of the world to a poet who could speak for all of it; from a poet focused on history to a poet concerned with modernity and who, always, had his eyes fixed on forever. Though Miłosz wrote in Polish, he worked closely with his American translators. While he often disagreed vehemently with America, he was, to use Susan Sontag’s term, a creator of inwardness in a land that has often needed it.

This place, California, was his refuge from the calamities of the twentieth century, though he did not intend it to be so, and could not have foreseen that California would be both a setting and a state of mind whose literature reflects such a range of affection and unease, both zen serenity and radical rebellion. California has an otherworldliness, even while decidedly of this world. Some unusual facts support its vaunted exceptionalism, and perhaps lend Miłosz’s lunar jest a more serious interpretation. It is the only major region of the country that was once considered an island— a sentiment that echoes the earlier implication that it is a colony, or perhaps the moon—and indeed the state still bears much of an island psychology, unmoored from any mainland.

California weather can seem to have a hypnotic monotony—a land of unrelieved sunshine and blue skies much of the year, where the temperatures rarely fall below freezing and generally stay within a mild, temperate range. The California Floristic Province, which includes most of California, is an island of its own, too: one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, and closer in character to the Mediterranean than to the rest of the United States—more Eden than El Paso. California has two thousand species of plants found nowhere else on Earth, as well as endemic butterflies, reptiles, and other creatures. It has trees forty feet in diameter and waterfalls a thousand feet high.

Yet California also offers a taste of apocalypse, something that haunts our lives and burdens our economy. The seasonal wildfires terrify our towns, and floods wash over our cities, sweeping away the traces man has left upon the land. The storms that come in from the ocean can uproot trees, throw boulders on highways, bury houses in mud, and tumble power lines. (A recent headline that announced Two-Story Waves Headed to Bay Area Beaches3 barely evoked a flicker of concern, it was so usual.) Earthquakes ripple and rip the Golden State without a moment’s warning, and we even live uneasily among active volcanos. (Protective spirits hid themselves in subterranean beds of bubbling ore, jolting the surface from time to time so that the fabric of freeways was bursting asunder, Miłosz wrote.4) The alien, hyperreal rockscapes along Highway 1 on the Central Coast cover fault lines, as do the wooded hills of Berkeley and the panoramic landscapes along Highway 280. The stunning views we enjoy are here because they lie on some of Earth’s most uncertain land, waiting only for a powerful shake to rearrange the geological furniture.

The region’s unsteady allure enchanted even the earliest explorers, those brave adventurers who discovered for themselves what the indigenous Californians already knew: that the terrain’s fertility made it a wonderland. This is even more true today. The Central Valley is dotted with almond and walnut groves, and vineyards to supply grapes to the hundreds of wineries. Punjabi immigrants have made rice an $800 million annual industry—the rice paddies line the highways, flooding the fields and bringing a hallucinatory green to the red ochre earth and scorched yellow of the surrounding hills. Most of us, refugees from harsher climes, quickly become accustomed to superabundant fresh fruit and vegetables year-round. Local figs and olives, pomegranates and peaches, asparagus and arugula fill our grocery aisles.

Springtime flowers linger to December, whether in the wild or in perfected gardens. We become accustomed to the fragrance of star jasmine in the air and the annual explosion of blossoms. Magnolia trees, bougainvillea, sunflowers and lilies, orchids and roses, all this against a backdrop of camphoraceous eucalyptus trees with their swaying branches of gray-green leaves. Hillsides of invasive orange California poppies stay with us through September. Then the dry months: the green hills turn yellow by late spring, and rain ceases, sometimes too early and too completely—drought and aridity under the hot sun is an aspect of life in California, too. Most of us adjust. Did he?

I did not choose California. It was given to me.

What can the wet north say to this scorched emptiness?5

• • •

In an era when air travel, satellites, and drones have turned the planet into a global neighborhood, few recall that California was once considered one of the most mysterious, unreachable, and unexplored places on Earth, in a category with Antarctica and Australia. Unreachable and unexplored, that is, except to the Native peoples who already lived here. California once had one of the densest populations on the continent, and it had been that way for thousands of years. How big was the population? Estimates vary widely, ranging up to seven hundred thousand people in two hundred different tribes.

For European explorers who came to California, however, the journey was perilous. To sail northward from Baja was nearly impossible—ships had to steer directly into the prevailing swells—and so instead, Spanish ships headed out toward Hawai‘i, then aimed far north of their California target. After that, they could sail southward along the coast. The route was indirect and no doubt costly, and for years these groups sought a fabled Northwest Passage that would connect the Pacific and the Atlantic. Miłosz was intrigued by the Spanish history of California, and he felt a kinship with it. He, too, was a stranger in a strange land; he also was an explorer on a long inward journey, one he documented in poetry, essays, and novels.

For the early Iberian explorers, everything in this new world upended expectations, seemed upside down, a walk through the looking glass. California disturbed their preconceptions from the outset: Europeans who washed ashore on the Baja peninsula thought they had arrived on an island off the coast of Asia. So that’s how early mapmakers portrayed it: as an island. They were right, in a sense.

From the very beginning, the region had invented its own past. One early example: In 1510, Castilian author Garci Ordóñez Rodríguez de Montalvo wrote a popular romance about a fictional tribe of black Amazon warrior women who inhabited a utopian island that was very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise. Everything was gold—no other metal but gold—and the Amazons kept griffins as pets, feeding them with live men. When the griffins had had their fill, they would snatch up any survivors, soar high over the cliffs and mountains of the rugged terrain, and then let the captives drop to their deaths. The general-queen of the Amazons, Calafia, was fierce and dazzling. (Perhaps her California heirs are, at least in spirit, the joggers who traverse our parks at sunrise, the women directors in our corporate boardrooms, our female senators and congresswomen.) Miłosz mentions her twice: in his ABC’s (2001), in which he refers to the prophetic quality of her name, and in Emperor of the Earth (1977), where he again alludes to the reason she’s remembered today—when she is remembered at all.6 But whether we realize it or not, she is honored forever for the name she inspired: California.

The etymology of her name is uncertain. In Montalvo’s novel, Calafia’s tribe of women were preparing to battle the Christians in the Promised Land, drawing the tale away from everywhen and into historical time. Her name may derive from caliph or caliphate—a ruler, or a state under such a ruler. Others say the name is from the Chanson de Roland, an eleventh-century French epic describing events in the eighth century. The poem mentions somewhere called Califerne, perhaps a distortion of the Persian Kar-i-farn, the mountain of Paradise. For us to mix these events in historical time with a sixteenth-century romance, using them to explain the name of a place that became a legend in itself—one with a major role in historical time—risks piling whimsy upon whimsy. On the other hand, one can argue that whimsy upon whimsy isn’t a bad description of California.

There’s a light quality to American culture. American culture wants to float,7 observed Miłosz’s friend, the California poet Jane Hirshfield. The comment is particularly true of California, more than anywhere else in the nation. We are bound to this terrestrial Paradiso by more than trees and technology. Our fealty is tied to more than an ethos and lifestyle, fresh fish and mild winters. We are all heirs to Akhenaten, adopted children of the sun.

It’s the light that intoxicates us—the extravagant, endless sunshine. Light universal, and yet it keeps changing, Miłosz wrote. For I too love the light, perhaps the light only.8 At first the unrelieved azure sky, the high-noon sun, is oppressive. The newcomer longs for shade, for dusk, for shadow, for stars. But soon one learns to sense the change of seasons not by snow or rain but rather by the difference between the radiant sunlight of summer that gives clarity and sharp relief to everything in its realm, and the lower slant of golden light in autumn, and then our haze-filled days of winter with the lingering sunsets that diffuse light and scatter shadows. In the rhythm of mild seasonal changes, California life passes like a trance. Time goes by. As Orson Welles observed, you sit down at twenty-five and stand up at sixty-two.

More light, more light! cried the dying Goethe. And so do we.

• • •

I visited Czesław Miłosz at his Grizzly Peak residence once, twice, in early 2000. The poet, in his home, was very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise, given the beauty of the setting. Neither of us were in our native realm, but he had lived here since 1960, two decades before I arrived. He was eighty-nine, in frail health, and our first meeting had to be organized with a precision and forethought that is routinely required for a space launch. I made a follow-up visit a few weeks later. It was a lucky coin in my life; they were the last media interviews he gave in America. By the time I received a fellowship to visit Poland, eight years had passed and he was long dead.

I asked him, then, about être and devenir, a repeated theme in his work. The words are simple enough in translation—être, to be; devenir, to become—but what he made of it remains elusive, hard to pin down. He dodged the question: My goodness. A big problem, he said. Then he gave it a try: "We are in a flux, of change. We live in the world of devenir. We look at the world of être with nostalgia. The world of essences is the world of the Middle Ages, of Thomas Aquinas." The Middle Ages stable? A nineteenth-century fiction, surely. Those centuries saw the rise of feudal states; Church power and monastic influence; revolutions in art, literature, culture; the growth of universities; the Black Death, political upheavals, and popular revolts—not to mention the scientific and mathematical advances in the Islamic world that gradually made their way westward.

No. Miłosz was instead considering more the direct influence of Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the most serene man who ever lived. For Aquinas, the world was not known, but it was knowable. He showed how everything could be classified and systematized in an orderly universe, synthesizing Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy in a way that formed the basis of Western civilization for centuries. Miłosz, with his strict Catholic upbringing, would have been soaked in this world and all its lessons and categories that schoolchildren once had to memorize.

The Thomist system gradually exhausted itself as modern thinkers displaced it, but it underwent a postwar revival in the twentieth century, inspiring Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, and others. Miłosz was in France during those years, and he studied with Father Daniel Lallement, an associate of Maritain, at the Institut Catholique. Paris was ground zero for neo-Thomism.

In my opinion, it is deadly to be completely dissolved in movement, in becoming, Miłosz continued. You have to have some basis in being, or in esse, the Latin birthplace of the English word essence. A few moments later, he went on: In general, the whole philosophy of the present moment is post-Nietzsche, the complete undoing of essences, of eternal truths. Postmodernism consists in denying any attempt at truth. I was inclined to press him, but he demurred, saying the subject needed great precision, which wasn’t possible in a conversation. I later searched his writings instead, but he was a poet, not a philosopher; his thinking was not systematic. In Thomistic theology, God is esse. To play with these ideas more freely, he, not surprisingly, turned to the French être. In doing this, he was also, in a sense, turning toward the French neo-Thomists, such as Maritain, who had been so influential in shaking up the stagnation that had occurred in Thomistic thought—Eliot’s still point of the turning world versus Hegel’s Spirit of History out walking, bringing change and revolution.

Miłosz’s America was the world of être, of the comparative (but only comparative) stability of natura, the term he used to describe a natural world running parallel to the domain of human affairs, rather than in its other meaning as the essence or pith of something—that is, the nature of it. What concern of mine, he said, were those presidential elections, the Democrats, the Republicans—I could not feel the rhythm of time in any of that. That was not a place where I could feel the granularity of historical time. Thus what remained was nature. I still perceive America exclusively as nature.9 Exclusively? The comment astonishes; he wrote so eloquently of the American psyche, of the nation’s history, its culture, and its people. He witnessed so much manmade upheaval.

The comment provides prima facie evidence of a category error he made: in immigrating to the United States, and specifically to California in 1960, he thought he was coming to the timeless world of nature. However, Berkeley was about to become a lightning rod for devenir, the world of change and becoming, and he would be in the thick of it. California was the domain not only of creation but of destruction—by fire, flood, and earthquake, and also by riots. The Bay Area became the epicenter of the Free Speech Movement, the political and sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, and eventually the technological revolution that was born in Silicon Valley and, at least for one infinitesimally small moment, seemed to have conquered time and space.

We live in a shape-shifting realm where nature and nurture blend, where it’s no longer clear what is manmade and what is inherent in nature—whether, for example, nature owns our weather, or we do. The spirit that presides over California is capricious and temperamental, forceful and untamed. And the contradictions grow more overwhelming every year: it is a realm of both sybaritic luxury and ecological imperatives, a landscape of natural wonders, and yet also the incubator for technological miracles, where, in many ways, our children would rather be bots. The region’s denizens are preoccupied with the self and psychoanalysis, yet prey to self-ignorance. People with unprecedented wealth jostle with those who search dumpsters for bistro scraps and take shelter under bridges or in Golden Gate Park. There’s a cruel side to California, for it is also a burial ground for broken hopes and crushed spirits, whether from Hollywood’s brutal and destructive dream machine to the soaring rent prices of the Bay Area, where the desperate take to the streets or hunker in their RVs along El Camino Real. Our homeless encampments, the needles and feces on San Francisco’s streets, the frantic scramble to make it on any terms—that is California, too.

This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places, wrote Robinson Jeffers. Tragedy has a metaphysical dimension as well, and beauty is part of it. Miłosz sensed it, too. Over decades, he described California in pages and pages of poetry and prose. The tentative questions I asked him when we spoke at his house led me to two decades of pondering his answers. Over the years, as I explored his thought, I came to see that though much has been written about him, mostly his life has been recounted by Poles, just as his poetry has been parsed by Poles, and, as a consequence, he has been seen mostly through a European lens. 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? It would be pat to say he gave us the past and we gave him the future. It implies that the scales were equal, even though there are 320 million of us and only one of him. Nevertheless, it’s partly true. In his American exile, he could publish freely, in a number of translations as well as in Polish, and he could become a Nobel poet with an international profile—a life that would have been impossible in Communist Poland.

Beyond what he gave us of himself, a remarkable cadre of translators was created under his tutelage and guidance, among them Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass (his foremost translator), former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Lillian Vallee, Richard Lourie, Clare Cavanagh, and others. His influence on American poetry—raising the stakes, as Hass put it—has been subtle, hard to pinpoint, but nevertheless durable and profound. Moreover, his engagement with our own literature, our own poets, our landscapes, has changed us as we viewed ourselves from his Lithuanian-Polish perspective, grounded in a past that is vanishing with him. Eventually, he considered himself one of us, and he wrote some of his most arresting poems about our landscape and history—and some ambivalent poems about California’s denizens (for example, Allen Ginsberg). He was one of Robinson Jeffers’s champions at a time when the Carmel poet had been critically rejected, and Miłosz’s horror and fascination with the poet he admired etched the California ethos into sharper relief. He layered a new level of awareness onto our self-perceptions, and added a more international perspective to our public conversation.

Miłosz lived among the many contradictions during his years here, and he wrote about them. Of course, he had contradictions of his own: he was both cerebral and earthy, and famously so in both directions. He was grounded in Aquinas and Augustine in one part of his psyche, while yielding to bigos with plenty of Żubrówka in the other. Poland, a land of enormous historical suffering, had not prepared him for paradise on Earth, this siren land that was once considered to be separate from the rest of the continent and surrounded by the sea. What hold does ruthless Calafia still have here?

According to Miłosz himself, plenty: I do not wish to play games with chains of causes and effects, and so will simply acknowledge that this continent possesses something like a spirit which malevolently undoes any attempts to subdue it.10 So the unbroken and barbarous Calafia is with us to this day, though the guises she takes may not be entirely natural. Her willful subduing and undoing may be a trick of the mind as well as the turns of historical forces.

By the time his breakthrough collection, Bells in Winter, was published in 1978, Miłosz had blended the worlds of Lithuania and California. In the book, he weaves together images of Vilnius spinsters with those of Western deserts, and he recalls the