Czeslaw Milosz

A California Life

Cynthia L. Haven

• Publisher: Heyday
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781597145497
• eBook ISBN: 9781597145534
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito letterario

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.

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 Beaches”³ 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, cultu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 California Considered as an Island
• 2 The Burning City
• 3 What the Beaver Said
• 4 “To earn honestly one’s bread one goes to America.”
• 5 Patmos
• 6 “I did not choose California. It was given to me.”
• 7 “Nothing witnesses here.”
• 8 “America when will you be angelic?”
• 9 A Defector from the Age of Aquarius
• 10 Lessons under Lamplight
• 11 Prophet of Être
• 12 “Only her love warmed him . . .”
• 13 Ars Moriendi
• 14 “Home, always back home.”
• 15 “There will be no other end of the world.”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author