Paying Attention

A foreign writer you’ve never heard of wins the Nobel prize for literature. A reasonably literate and reasonably curious reader, you do a little research and decide, on not much evidence, whether or not to give him or her a try. One can’t keep up with everything, particularly in old age, so many a possibly brilliant writer nowadays gets given a miss. But there have been times when the Nobel has disclosed a writer who became essential to my life.

When I was young I caught up suddenly with Camus (1957) and Pasternak (1958) and more gradually with Beckett (1969) and Solzhenitsyn (1970). But the prizewinner who struck me most forcibly was Czesław Miłosz (1980), a Polish writer of extraordinary intelligence and sensibility, a wonderful poet who also, through more than half a century, wrote much prose in which autobiography, history, philosophy and politics are intermingled, his books forming a sustained critical commentary on the worlds he inhabited. Among several of his works rushed into English translation and paperback editions when he was awarded the prize, was a short novel, The Issa Valley, originally published in Polish in Paris in 1955, which belongs with the handful of masterpieces recording prelapsarian childhoods (Cider with Rosie, for example, and Herbert Read’s The Innocent Eye). Miłosz was born, in 1911, in his maternal grandparents’ house in rural Lithuania, a country whose history was always entangled with that of Poland. Lithuania (along with more than half of Poland) was then part of the Russian empire. Miłosz’s Polish father, a civil engineer, had been building bridges in Siberia for the Tsar’s First World War army when the Russian Revolution found him and his family in a town on the Volga. Miłosz, 6 at the time, later remembered only a Russian soldier covered in blood appearing at his bedside, muttering something about officers being murdered and then vanishing. After some chaotic months, and a number of terrifying train journeys through battlefields, with desperate crowds of refugees clinging to the buffers and incomprehensible stops and starts, his mother managed to get him back to her parents’ house, where she left him for the next three years. His father had enlisted in the Polish army. His mother visited rarely. ‘In reward for all this,’ he wrote forty years later in his autobiography Native Realm,

when I arrived at the end of the journey, I found an earthly paradise . . . The days unfolded, just as they had for centuries, to the rhythm of work in the fields, Catholic feasts, solemn processions, and the rites of Christian-pagan magic . . . The same rhythm persisted up to the Second World War. I entered into a stunning greenness, into choruses of birds, into orchards bent low with the weight of fruit, into the enchantment of my native river, so unlike the boundless, dreary rivers of the Eastern plains.

This was the small universe, the manor house, garden and orchard, the village, the church, the graveyard, the priest’s house, the river, the hills and forests and lakes, described in The Issa Valley. The name is invented; the place is real, caught for ever in Miłosz’s memory and imagination. Coleridge once called imagination ‘the power to disimprison the soul of fact’: The Issa Valley confirms this definition to a very high degree. Thomas, Miłosz’s name for himself in the story, loves his grand- father, a Polish-Lithuanian (think Anglo-Irish) gentleman who is looked up to or resented, according to their politics, by his tenants and the villagers. He had been an impoverished young nobleman in nineteenth-century Wilno (now Vilnius, capital of Lithuania; then, according to Tsar Alexander II, ‘the third city of Russia’). He already belongs to the past, but for now, friendly, shabby and unpretentious, he is still a figure of gentle authority. Thomas’s fierce, loving grandmother is also Polish but looks and behaves like a Lithuanian peasant. The gentry speak Polish and regard themselves as part of Polish civilization; the peasants speak Lithuanian. Thomas’s elementary education is delivered in Polish by a radical in the village, though he hates the language and hopes for the destruction of the gentry. Influenced by him, a young revolutionary, aiming randomly at a whole class, throws a grenade through Thomas’s bedroom window. Thomas feels the draught from the broken window; the grenade has rolled under his bed, but it doesn’t explode. Thomas is a collector. With the help of his grandfather’s small library, he lists in secret notebooks the Latin names of all the birds, plants and animals he can find. He accompanies his hero, a local huntsman and forester, in the wilds that surround the village and its farms, and learns from him how to shoot duck and blackcock (minding bitterly when he succeeds) on hunting expeditions that are as exciting as similar days in the forest recorded by Turgenev and Tolstoy. The grown-ups are vividly described as a bright pre-adolescent boy perceives them. There is a love triangle – infuriating to Thomas – involving his hero the huntsman, the huntsman’s obedient but spirited maid-of-all work, and Thomas’s aunt, who is on the lookout for a lover. A beautiful girl bewitches Thomas as she bewitches the parish priest who employs her as his housekeeper; he has to banish her when they become scandalously involved. She kills herself. The priest travels for miles to fetch her by horse and cart to bury her in the village graveyard. But she haunts the village for ever, as does the ghost of a guilt-tormented forester who, for no reason, had killed a Russian prisoner-of-war on the run from his German captors. The forester, desperate and usually drunk, goes to the local magician for help, and also to a wise Hasidic rabbi. In the Issa valley Jews have been part of the scenery since time immemorial: the leading merchant in the village is an alarming Jew on stormy but affectionate terms with the squire. The anguished forester comes to a terrible end. Lithuania was the very last part of Europe to become Christian. It was converted to (Catholic) Christianity only at the end of the fourteenth century, by bullying Teutonic Knights and such figures as Chaucer’s Knight, recently returned to England from crusade in ‘Lettow’. Mixed with Catholic piety are still-pagan customs and superstitions. Devils abound. Some are mere mischief-makers, like Irish leprechauns or Shakespeare’s Puck. Sometimes a devil appears as a small, malevolent, eighteenth-century philosopher, in ‘a green frock coat, a jabot, his hair in a pigtail, [who] tries to conceal his hoofs, which are an embarrassment to him, with high-heeled slippers’. The Issa valley scarcely noticed the First World War: three German officers on beautiful horses appear at the manor, impressing Thomas no end; the captain drinks some milk out of a jug on the doorstep; they salute and ride away. Miłosz, writing in the 1950s, can’t resist, clearly from another memory, imagining this German twenty-odd years later, ‘in a general’s car, surrounded by comfort rugs and thermos flasks’ as he is ‘chauffeured through the streets of an East European city freshly conquered by the Führer’s army’. The Second World War destroyed Thomas’s paradise for ever. ‘Where’, the postwar Miłosz asks, would the spirits and the priests and the rabbis ‘take refuge when the earth was ploughed up by the tracks of tanks, when those who were about to be executed dug their own shallow graves by the river, and when, in blood and tears, Industrialization rose up, surrounded by the halo of History?’ He returned to the valley in 1991, just as the Soviet Union collapsed, and found that half a century of communism had desolated the village, felled the forests and fruit trees, and poisoned the river with chemicals. Removed from the Issa when his mother finally returned, Miłosz was educated in Polish Wilno, in a good gymnasium and then at the ancient university. As a law student he felt he belonged neither with nationalist, anti-Semitic Poles nor with Marxist enthusiasts, many of them Jews. His sympathy for the Jews, in what was then, for Jews, ancestral Vilna, ‘the Jerusalem of the north’, produced his lifelong antipathy to Polish nationalism: ‘at an early age, I was already lost for the Right’. During the Second World War, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, he worked and wrote for the resistance, managed to rescue some Jews and witnessed the horrors of 1944 and 1945. Having tried being a diplomat in postwar Washington, representing the increasingly Stalinist Polish regime, he fled to Paris in 1951. There he was miserable, isolated between exiled Poles and marxisant French intellectuals. He was also poor. ‘Westerners like to dwell in the empyrean of noble words about spirit and freedom; but it is not often that they ask someone whether he has enough money for lunch.’ During his decade in Paris he wrote, among other books, The Issa Valley. He moved to an academic post in California in 1961 and wrote acutely about being an East European in the newest part of the New World. Eventually, at over 80, he was able to return to free Poland. He died in Cracow in 2004. Because he had once worked for the communist state and didn’t seem like a proper Catholic, there were objections to his being buried in the Skalka, the church that had for centuries been the pantheon of Poland. These were overruled by his parish priest and Pope John Paul II. (The same thing happened when Pascal died. His parish priest successfully confirmed his orthodoxy against those who didn’t want him buried in St-Étienne-du-Mont. Miłosz would have enjoyed the parallel.) The Pope and the parish priest were right. As a student, Miłosz had been a socialist, but he had never joined any communist party. For all his aversion to Polish nationalism, his writing is profoundly Catholic; his poetry is marked by his fidelity to God and by the quality of his attention, particularly to people one by one. This is the poet who, at the age of 7, identified, and never forgot, beetles and snowdrops, ptarmigan and varieties of apple, an eagle owl and a white ermine dancing on the frozen river in the Issa valley. He revered, and translated into Polish, Simone Weil, who wrote: ‘Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Lucy Beckett 2026