Worthy, but wordy

Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality wryly depicts Goethe preparing for immortality — neatly laying out his life in Dichtung und Warheit and arranging for Johann Eckermann to record his conversation. He is, says Kundera, designing a handsome smoking jacket, posing for posterity. He wants to look his best. Then along comes the young Bettina von Arnim, a platonic flirtation from his past, with an alternative, memorably ridiculous version, ostensibly admiring, in which Goethe’s wife Christiane is portrayed as ‘the crazy, fat sausage’. There is immortal egg on the facings of that smoking jacket.

In the case of Czesław Miłosz, we have a variant on this paradigm. He wanted, as it were, to replace the smoking jacket with the white tie and tails he wore in Stockholm in December 1986 to receive the Nobel Prize. How do we know? Two years later, under the heading ‘Witness’, A. Alvarez reviewed his Collected Poems 1931–1987 in the New York Review of Books with unstinted admiration.