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. To his amazement, a month and a half later, an irked Miłosz complained that Alvarez had made him political and had slighted the poetry by concentrating on the prose non-fiction, The Captive Mind (1953) and Native Realm (1968).

His defection from communism remains, however, the central event of Miłosz’s life and the focus of our continuing interest. Communism involved the consumption of toad sandwiches. Or, as he puts it, a continuous diet of frogs: ‘My own decision proceeded not from the functioning of the reasoning mind but from a revolt of the stomach,’ he wrote in The Captive Mind. It is a powerful image and one that influenced ‘The Power of Taste’, Zbigniew Herbert’s poem about the rejection of communism for its intellectual coarseness, its emetic vulgarity: ‘We had a pinch of indispensible courage/ but basically it was a matter of taste…’

Of course, Miłosz: A Biography adds touches of colour to this central narrative.