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05/27/2022

Czeslaw Milosz: A Discussion with Cynthia Haven

Cynthia L. Haven is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and author of Czesław Miłosz: A California Life, from Berkeley’s Heyday Books and 2018’s Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, the first-ever biography of the renowned French theorist. She has also published two previous books on Czesław Miłosz: An Invisible Rope: […]

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This is KZSU, Stanford.
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I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
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We're coming to you from the Stanford camps.
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The song is Black Cat from the album, Acquiring the Taste by our old friends,
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Gentle Giant.
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I chose the song because our show today deals with the Polish-American poet,
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S.A.S. and Nobel laureate, Chez Lao Milosch.
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And I happened upon a remarkable cat-pole of his,
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which I thought I would read aloud in English to give you a taste of what kind of poet
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we will be talking about in the next hour with my guest.
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From what I'm able to gather, it's addressed to someone who had just published an S.A. titled
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Against Cruelty.
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The poem goes by the title to Mrs. Professor in defense of my cat's honor and not only.
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Here we go.
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My valiant helper, a small-sized tiger,
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sleep sweetly on my desk by the computer, unaware that you insult his tribe.
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Cats play with a mouse or with a half-dead mole.
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You are wrong, though.
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It's not out of cruelty.
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They simply like a thing that moves.
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For after all, we know that only consciousness can, for a moment, move into the other.
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Empathize with the pain and panic of a mouse.
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And such as cats are, all of nature is, in different elasse to the good and the evil.
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Quite a problem for us, I am afraid.
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Natural history has its museums, but why should our children learn about monsters,
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an earth of snakes and reptiles for millions of years?
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Nature devouring, nature devoured, butchery day and night smoking with blood,
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and who created it?
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Was it the good Lord?
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Yes, undoubtedly they are innocent.
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Spiders, mantises, sharks, pythons.
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We are the only ones who say cruelty.
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Our consciousness and our conscience alone, in the pale and till of galaxies,
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put their hope in a humane God.
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Who cannot but feel and think, who is kindred to us by his warmth and movement,
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for we are, as he told us, similar to him.
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Yet it is so, and he takes pity on every mould mouse, every wounded bird,
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then the universe for him is like a crucifixion.
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Such is the outcome of your attack on the cat, a theological, Augustinian grimace,
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which makes difficult, are walking on this earth.
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So from a house-cat sleeping near a computer to the amoral order of nature,
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to the crucifixion of the universe, that's chislaw Milosch, condensing into a handful of
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verses, the kind of thinking that only poets are capable of.
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And speaking of thinking, Darwin wrote somewhere that the suffering of the lower animals,
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throughout time, was more than he could bear to think of.
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In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul wrote of the mulese of the earth as a whole, declaring,
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"The whole creation has been groaning in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."
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Maybe Paradise is open to all of God's creatures, as Pope Francis reportedly told a
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distraught boy whose dog had just died. It's an edifying thought, but one that I suspect Milosch
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would respond to by saying, "It should be so, even if it isn't so."
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It was intensely aware was Milosch, that in its indifference a last to the good and the evil,
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nature invariably has a way of flummoxing our human ideas of justice and our human longing for justice.
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"My guest today is Cynthia Haven, a literary scholar, critics,
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lavists and journalists. She's written for a wide range of publications, including the TLS,
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the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, New York Times book review.
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She's a national endowment for the humanity's public scholar, and she studied with Joseph Brodsky.
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And as one many literary and journalistic awards, she's also the author of many excellent books
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among them, "Evolution of Desire," a life of Kunejirad, a frequent guest on this program in the
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earliest years when we launched back in 2005. Also, Joseph Brodsky, "Conversations,"
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"Chaslau Milosch Conversations," and most recently, "Chaslau Milosch, a California Life,"
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which came out with "Hey Day Press," up here in Berkeley, a really excellent press
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in 2021. I'll also mention that Cynthia Haven runs the best literary blog in the blogosphere.
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It's called "The Book Haven," and all of you literary-minded listeners out there will want to check that out,
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"The Book Haven." Cynthia, welcome to entitled opinions. "Thank you Robert, pleasure to be here."
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You spent several years researching and writing your recent biography of Milosch,
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so I'd like to know first off, what was it that drew you to him in the first place, and
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inspired you to devote so much of your time to writing a biography of his California life, as you call it?
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Well, as you mentioned, I had been a student of Joseph Brodsky. I studied with him a few years
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after his death, I was rereading some of his essays, and I came across a recommendation of
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Teswaffe Milosch that he made as perhaps the greatest poet of our time. I'll read the statement,
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"And for this was a statement to the 1978 Nuastat jury, which as one knows a Nuastat award is a
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precursor for the Nobel, and it was in this case because Milosch got the Nobel two years later,
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and this was the Joseph Brodsky recommendation, quote, "I have no hesitation whatsoever in
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stating that Teswaffe Milosch is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.
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Even if one strips his poems of the stylistic magnificence of his native Polish,
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which is what translation inevitably does, and reduces them to the naked subject matter,
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we still find ourselves confronting the severe and relentless mind of such intensity
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that the only parallel one is able to think of is that of the biblical characters most likely job."
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Well, that was a wow. I immediately began to look him up and try to find out more about him,
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and I found out he lived across the bay from me. I'm in Palo Alto, he was across the bay
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in Berkeley, where he had lived 40 years. Actually, that's more years than any other place he spent
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in his life, and it's the focus of my book. We think of California as an interlude, but he spent
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more time there than in Poland or Lithuania or really anywhere else. Anyway, I tried to arrange an
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interview with him since I was a literary journalist. I thought this was a way of getting to
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know him, as it had been for so many other people that I studied and wrote about. It wasn't easy.
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He was 89. He was about to turn 89. It was near his birthday, and he wasn't giving interviews anymore.
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So I began talking to his assistant. I mentioned Joseph Brodsky as my contact cartoon tray,
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and it took six months, but I got an interview with him. We spoke for several hours
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upon grizzly peak in his living room. After that, I asked if I could come back,
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and he granted a second interview. It was a month later because I had a trip to Egypt in between.
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And a second interview, I thought things went well, and that would be the beginning of a relationship,
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but that turned out not to be the case. He went back to Poland for his regular visit every year,
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his health declined, and he never returned to Berkeley. So that's the way I got to be the
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last journalist to interview him in America. Were you able to accumulate enough information and insights
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in your two meetings with him to feed your biography of his California life? I use those
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excerpts from that interview a lot. I have a 7,000 word transcript. I was accepted for the Georgia
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review. It became the basis of a study, a life-lunked or at least for me 20 years study now.
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Of him, I was at that point. He was publishing a treatise on poetry for the first time in English.
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This is the time lapse we experienced with me, which there was a 50 year lapse between the writing
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of that great poem shortly after the war. It's a book length poem called Short Book
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Lengths, called "Bome Called a Treatise on Poetry." It's a poem or a treatise in poetry.
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I got it. Treatise in verse, got it. It was the first book of his that I'd read.
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And it convinced you that he was indeed worthy of those hyperbodies that Joseph Broske had written down.
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It convinced me that I was stepping into a very deep river. And it was just the beginning of my
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exploration. And it would go on for 20 years without cessation. I'm still exploring. It's still
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unfinished. He's endless. And do you, are you as devoted to him and his of her as you are and
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were to Broskeeds? Because you've done a lot for Broske as well.
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There's such different minds and such different people. I keep coming back to what his publishers
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said to me. He referred to the continent, Mieboche. And I really feel like it's a world.
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And you can see the fullness of Mieboche's knowledge. He never tired. He was never bored by anything.
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There are all these stories about him. I'll tell a story that Robert Haas told me.
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One day he came into Mieboche's house. And Mieboche was reading a book about women's underwear in the
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late 19th century. It's sort of catalog. And Robert Haas said, what are you being that for? And he said,
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he wanted to identify what was hanging on the clothes lines when he was a boy in Lithuania.
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He was endlessly curious. He wanted to know anything. This is another story I love. He had been born
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in Lithuania. And of course became a Polish poet. But because he was part of the Polish speaking
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century, he had never actually learned Lithuanian. And he was starting to learn it in his 80s.
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And Robert Haas says, why are you bothering to learn Lithuania now? And he said, because I think
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it may be the language of heaven. Do we know why he said that? I don't know that the
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Lithuanian is particularly melodious and angelic or what? He didn't specify.
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But it was the language he heard growing up and perhaps that wasn't of. He very much idealized
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Is Lithuanian childhood? So he is, as you call him a world or a planet more than even a continent,
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that's presumably because he was many things. He was a poet. He was an essayist. He was a diplomat.
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I mean, he had a career as a diplomat for a while. He had lived through all the major events and
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disasters of the 20th century. And he was born before the beginning of World War I,
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that's basically born in 1911. He lived through that war and then through the communist revolution
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in Russia. And then the Second World War and the Holocaust and Stalinism. And in that
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respect his biography, it really spans an entire century. He's a poet, as a essay,
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he also wrote an important book about totalitarianism and the psychology of totalitarianism. So
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I understand that he is extremely multidimensional. And is that your ambition and your biography is to
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show just how all these different aspects of one individual life came together in one man?
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That was a temptation I had to avoid. I wanted to look at him from a California perspective.
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There's already been a masterful biography by Andre Proufenoczek, which has been translated into English,
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Princeton University Press. I had to resist the temptation to write a 500 page book.
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I wanted to keep in mind what he brought to us in California and what we brought to him.
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And what did he bring to California? What did California give him?
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Well, the most obvious thing, California gave him a place where he could write in peace and have a job.
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You have to understand, he described Polish as an unheard of tongue in one of his poems.
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There was no cash of Polish translators. There was not a community that he could plug into.
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He saw that problem by in his class from training a generation of Polish translators,
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people like Claire Kavanaugh, people like Wojdulurie, Bob Haas, Robert Pinsky. All of these people
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brought what we call the sort of Polish flowering in the 20th century of literature
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was because of his efforts. He made that happen. The first tasks he took on in California,
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were writing the book's post-war Polish poetry, which introduced people like the big nephew, Herbert.
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Fishfulo, the Shamborska, Tadeo, Shwazayevich, all these major figures, he brought them into
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English. He and Peter Dale Scott of Berkeley did the first selected poems for the big nephew, Herbert.
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But his history of Polish literature, which is a 600 page book, has been called a textbook that
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can be read for fun. He introduced Polish culture, its literature, into the American and into the
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Western world in English. What year does he arrive in California? 1960, he got an invitation out of
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the blues. So most of his major work was written in California. Yes, it is remarkable.
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It is remarkable. And it's something that goes so overlooked. I'm astonished because his
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sensibility, the experience of the Holocaust, the war, the destruction of Warsaw, and all this
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horribly dark history that he was a witness to, and his metaphysical sensibilities and his
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intense awareness of the tragic disconnect between nature's amoral order and our human demand for
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justice, as I mentioned in my introductory remarks, that California seems like the antithesis of
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someone who understands the shadows and the darkness and the night world of human
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tragedy and disaster. And here he finds himself in a state of the golden state with the clearness of the
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view, the openness and the belief in the future and the kind of new age attitudes, it's quite
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astonishing that he did so much creative work in the state of ours. We had peace. He was up on
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grizzly peak. He was basically given carte blanche for biburcly to do what he wanted. And that was
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the reason for the astonishing productivity. Yeah, but I was reading a poem that you brought my
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attention to. I think it's about a California, is it a magic mountain? Yes. Is it a California
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poem? Yes. That's early poem. That's 1973. 73, but he seems very ironic about California. Oh, yes.
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He did not embrace California without ambiguity. Oh, a great deal of ambiguity. Do you want to read that one?
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It's a bit long. So maybe maybe we'll hold off before we read it. And that's just, if you don't mind,
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if he arrived in the 60s, a number of important things happened before he arrived and after the war
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where he becomes a diplomat, correct? And he is sent to Washington, I think I believe, or New York to
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Washington in the late 40s. This was right after the war. He was standing on the ruins of Warsaw,
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men were unemployed. There were no jobs. The only jobs were government jobs pretty much. So he has
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been criticized most recently by Ann Applebaum for taking a government job in the Stalinist government.
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But as his son said, he got a job. He was a cultural attaché, which is the lowest ranking
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appointment in the diplomatic corps. And he got to go abroad. This is big neph Herbert
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was fighting much of his life to get that privilege. We were shut it off the bat by being a diplomat.
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He arranged cultural exchanges and that sort of thing. He was sent to New York City, which of course is
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especially then the literary capital of the US. He made many friends. We make the argument in my
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book that he actually probably met WH on. He was a good friend with Thornton Wilder who helped
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to go with great deal after he had defected. It was a playground. He went to the bread loaf conference.
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He translated Negro spirituals. Then he was transferred to Washington at that point.
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Thornton was coming down with a stronger hand with a lot of electoral developments in Poland.
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And it was a government job, much more boring. He got moved to France and was a diplomat there.
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And that's when he defects. That's when he defects. And why did he decide to defect?
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There is an amazing storyteller where he was going back to Poland for a visit. He was coming from a
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diplomat, a government party, probably Tuxedo, everything else. And as he was driving home,
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probably half drunk, if not more, he saw a truck of people being taken away by the government
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for questioning or whatever was going to be doomed to them shivering, even though it was a summer
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night, it was cold. As he was all dressed up and parting on the government's dime, he was watching
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the people being taken away to nobody knows where. And he said that night, he realized what he had
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been a part of. I doubt it was the first time he had occurred to him, but it struck home in an important
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way. Shortly after that, the government in Poland, while he was there took away his passport,
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that was a sign that he was about to be arrested. He managed to finagle his passport back enough to
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get back to France. And that's when he knew he had to make a move and defect. One morning, February
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1st 1951, he went on to the street, laden with suitcases, and took a taxi to the outskirts of Paris.
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That's when Maison Lafitte had an important emigrate community now legendary for its publications
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and its maintenance of Polish culture in France during that time of when France was Stalinist.
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In the subsequent few months, he was self-doubting. He wasn't sure he'd done the right thing. He was
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drinking too much, pacing up and down and arguing with the people and making himself
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a nuisance to Maison Lafitte. He was told not to appear in front of windows. It was that dangerous.
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He could be kidnapped. And in those tormented months, he wrote the book, Captive Mind, which
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is an exhalation of grief and recognition of what happens to the mind under totalitarianism.
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Is it in the captive mind that he recounts the figure of swallowing frogs?
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After his defection, he was the first defector from the communist government to give a press conference
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and to give the reasons for his defection. And he said the paramount role of a poet is to tell the truth.
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He compared communism to the process of swallowing frogs. You might be able to get one down,
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perhaps even a second, but at the third frog, it's not the revolt of the mind or the feelings,
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it's a revolt of the stomach. This actually compromised his friendships and relations with a number
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of French intellectuals who were very pro-stalinists at this point, right?
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The intelligentsia of France was pretty universally Stalinist. The Pablo Neruda had been a friend.
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He was a cultural artache from Chile, similar position, a communist, wrote an essay about him
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called "The Man Who Ran Away" that hurt on a lot of levels. All his friends divisured at him
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with the powerful exception of Albert Camus.
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Yeah, well, Camus, you can always count on Camus to come through for you.
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So he defecks his, he's separated from his family. I think his wife is at this point back in
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Poland or in America or somewhere in hell. His wife wasn't Washington DC where they had lived
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together when he was as a cultural artache. His reappointment to France. They had not had a time to
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bring her over yet. So yes, he was separated from his wife, his oldest son, and also his wife was
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pregnant. She had had a very difficult first pregnancy and she was strongly advised not to go anywhere
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by her doctors and the second birth was a traumatic one.
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You how does he end up in California, Cynthia? Where did that offer to go to California come from?
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He won a major literary award which turned around his finances somewhat in Europe,
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major European award. He got an offer out of the blue from Berkeley.
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He turned them down the first time in 1959, but the offer was renewed and he came to California in 1960.
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Yeah, okay. So he publishes a bells and winter in 1978. He gets an Nobel Prize in 1980.
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And then he remains in California until it, as we said, until 81 when the solidarity movement in
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Poland had loosened things up and he goes back and forth between Poland and California for
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the next couple of decades, right? Well, it was a remarkable experience to him. He didn't know
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he had an audience in Poland. He thought nobody read him because he was basically a forbidden writer
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and within days of his return to Poland, the presses were running and I think there was a hundred
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thousand copies of his first book that sold out immediately. He was cheered in the streets. People were
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following him and there was still a good number of his old friends from Poland that he could
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meet he had a brother in Poland. He knew some of that, but as Helen Vennler put it, he didn't know
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because he hadn't seen. He thought that he had no reputation in Poland at all and suddenly he was a
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hero being followed and mobbed in the streets. He had an old world country to exalt poets.
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A good old country like Poland imagine the homecoming of an American poet. It would go
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without a ripple anyway. Well, I attended his 2000 poetry reading in Berkeley. It was the last
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reading he gave it was during the time I interviewed him and I have to say I had never seen a
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poetry reading like that. People were crowding to get into the
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hall in Berkeley. I forgot the name of the hall. People were hanging from the ballast raids.
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People were, it was like a rock star. I understand that that's a fraction of what he got in Poland,
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but it was more than I'd ever seen for poetry reading in America.
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Right. Well, Nobel Prize will do wonders for your attendance.
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Plus being a homeboy. Yes, exactly. Do you think that he did his best work as a writer in California?
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It's so hard to judge it accurately, isn't it? Because the bulk of his work was here and this is
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something that people forget. He wrote remarkable poems about our people, our country, our
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landscapes. Is there one you would like to read? Well, we've spoken so much about suffering.
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He went through an enormous suffering in his life. The death of his first wife later,
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everything. What bothers me when we talk about Mirosh, when I try to bring him to people,
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I mention the name in their faces fall and they say, oh, poet of witness, holocaust, destruction
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of Warsaw. But he was also a poet of the miraculous. He was a poet of wonder.
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And as I've argued, he was the best poet of old age. We've had since a lot of women.
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Anyway, here's a late life poem that shows some of that. It's called Awakened.
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It's not a poem actually. It's a short prose, but I don't think you could call it a prose poem,
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but anyway, here it is. In advanced age, my health worsening, I woke up in the middle of the night
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and experienced a feeling of happiness so intense and perfect that in all my life,
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I had only felt its premonition. And there was no reason for it. It didn't obliterate consciousness.
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The past, which I carried, was there together with my grief and it was suddenly included,
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was a necessary part of the whole. As if a voice were repeating, you can stop worrying now. Everything
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happened just as it had to. You did what was assigned to you and you are not required anymore
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to think of what happened long ago. The piece I felt was a closing of accounts and was connected
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with the thought of death. The happiness on this side was like an announcement of the other side.
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I realized that this was an undeserved gift and I could not grasp by what grace it was bestowed on me.
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That's a poem that Nietzsche would call Amor Fati, the love of one's fate, whatever fate has
00:29:04.800
bestowed on you. I like that. I accept it with a certain kind of love.
00:29:10.640
That's a very promising poem. It's a promise that maybe on the other side there is
00:29:22.000
some kind of redemption. Often there are other poems in which he despairs of any sort of redemption.
00:29:29.920
The oddest see, for example, is a poem that doesn't have nearly the same opening into the miraculous,
00:29:41.760
as you call it. Let me see what he says there so that our listeners can get a sense of the other
00:29:48.160
side. No, it won't do by sweet theologians. Desire will not save the morality of God.
00:29:53.680
If he created beings able to choose between good and evil and they chose and the world lies in
00:30:01.440
iniquity, nevertheless there is pain and the undeserved torture of creatures, which would find its
00:30:10.640
explanation only by assuming the existence of an archetypal paradise and a pre-human downfall
00:30:17.600
so great that the world of matter received its shape of diabolical power. That's a modern day version of
00:30:27.040
mannequianism and the idea that the world that we inhabit is engendered and in the possession of
00:30:34.960
demonic powers, diabolical powers. We should have read awakened after the oddest see because it gives us
00:30:46.080
a much more forceful last word, I would say. The oddest see is one of his poems where it plays with various
00:30:52.240
hearices. This idea that the existence of an archetypal paradise is the notion that I mentioned at the
00:31:02.160
beginning where Pope Francis is reportedly to have said to a boy that paradise is open to all of God's
00:31:10.240
creatures. Apparently he may not have said that in exactly those words but I think
00:31:17.680
Miloch would have understood exactly what the Pope had in mind. Yes. I think one of the hearices that
00:31:26.400
he likes playing with the most, I think that's the most appealing to us, is Puckata Stasis,
00:31:33.120
which is a notion that's in the writings of origin, that all will be saved and everything will be
00:31:39.760
restored. All of creation will be renewed at the end of time. And how Catholic was he ultimately,
00:31:48.000
he was born Catholic but he certainly was not Orthodox in any. Yes he was not Orthodox.
00:31:54.560
And yet I spoke with someone who remembers seeing him at St. Mary Magdalene and Berkeley
00:32:04.080
after Vatican II and kneeling on the floor in prayer, rejecting the dealer and having his knees on
00:32:11.760
the stone ground, the floor, whatever it was. Leonard Nathan, who's a friend of his and a colleague at
00:32:22.160
Berkeley, reviewed one of his books and met him in the library and said, "I've really enjoyed
00:32:32.240
your poems, I reviewed them, but I have to say, I questioned some of your poems, you really play
00:32:39.520
with some hearices here in Miloch, Linda, and how do you think I feel? It's a practicing Catholic."
00:32:47.120
Exactly. So we fast forward a little bit to his, I'm curious, is he buried in Warsaw?
00:33:01.280
Krakow. Krakow. A Peter on the rock. So he spent his last years of his life in Poland.
00:33:07.760
Yes, in desire and also he was a health exile. His health became fragile. The only time he returned
00:33:16.800
after 2000 when I met him was when his second wife, his beloved second wife, an American second wife,
00:33:25.040
very American. He was brought into a southern family and was very close to the Sigmund family of Atlanta.
00:33:31.680
Suddenly became ill. She was a very healthy woman, had never been ill in her life,
00:33:36.320
and in desperation to save her. Save her, they flew her back to California.
00:33:40.960
And when he got word she was dying, he was not in condition to fly, but nonetheless,
00:33:48.160
he was told if you want to see your wife for the last time, this is your opportunity.
00:33:53.840
So that was his last time in California. And perhaps as the last time left a sort of bitter taste in his
00:34:01.920
mouth to lose a woman he had loved so much. After that he went back to Poland.
00:34:08.000
After that he went back to Poland, that's where he died. He was writing poems
00:34:13.280
to the last few days of his life, according to a woman who was helping him and assisting him at
00:34:21.200
that time. She said he was waking up in the morning in the hospital with poems in his head.
00:34:26.480
I'm assuming that he had what amounted to a national funeral. Is that correct?
00:34:33.760
It was a national funeral and there were demonstrations.
00:34:38.720
Pro and con. He was always controversial and he didn't quite fit in anywhere. There were people
00:34:50.080
protesting that he should not be given a state funeral because he was not actually Polish. He was
00:34:56.560
Lithuanian. There were people that were saying that he should not have a Catholic funeral because
00:35:02.400
he wasn't properly Catholic. He played with too many hearices. And it was only resolved with a letter
00:35:09.440
from the Pope saying that he'd been in communication with me. And he had told him that he was a proper
00:35:16.400
Catholic or unconventional proper Catholic. He got the benediction. He got the benediction.
00:35:22.880
Well that's great. Good for him.
00:35:25.680
May rest in peace. At one point the Pope came to him and said I don't understand what you're doing
00:35:36.000
with your religion. You come one step forward and then you go one step back where you go two steps
00:35:42.880
forward and then one. May most said is there any other way to write about religion in the 20th century?
00:35:48.800
Or 21st century to 21st century by that point? Yeah. Exactly.
00:35:53.840
21st century.
00:35:54.880
All right. All very interesting. So I think essentially you've been an ambassador for
00:36:01.760
Chaslo Miloch in a way that I think our listeners are going to want to go and read him
00:36:09.120
for themselves, both his poetry as well as his even his political writings captive mind is still in print
00:36:16.080
and well worth the read. And we've only scratched the surface. Yes.
00:36:22.560
And going deeper into the surface under the surface your book about a California life
00:36:32.240
published by Hay Day Press just this last year is an excellent place to start. So I hope so.
00:36:38.560
That's what I wanted it to be. All right. Because it's a world that you need to have some entry point.
00:36:44.320
Thanks again for coming on to entitled opinions in Thea.
00:36:47.760
Thank you for the opportunity.
00:36:50.000
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Bye bye.
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