Mightier than the sword

Legends of Modernity

Essays and Letters From Occupied Poland 1942-1943

Czeslaw Milosz

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 270 pp., $25

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IN his later years, Czeslaw Milosz sometimes made laconic but highly provocative pronouncements about the relationship between literature and history. “I hold Whitman responsible for World War I and Darwin responsible for World War II,” he once said, with neither a laugh nor even a grin. Behind that comment was the knowledge that Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, had been a passionate reader of Walt Whitman’s poetry, and that the Nazis were enamored of eugenics and biological theories of race.

Readers acquainted with Milosz’s poetry know well his enormous love of Whitman; also, as a young man, Milosz studied biology and evolution and was something of an amateur naturalist. Did he really hold Whitman and Darwin responsible for such great catastrophes?

A simple answer was not possible. Instead, Milosz offered “Legends of Modernity,” his effort to understand what led Europe to the disasters -- Nazism and Stalinism -- it found itself in and then to consider what possibilities, if any, lay ahead for a new foundation of faith in humanity.

The late Nobel laureate is chiefly remembered for his poems, essays and books such as “The Captive Mind,” his famous 1953 study of thinkers in a totalitarian state. Here is one of his earliest sustained works of literary criticism, for the first time translated into English, by Madeline G. Levine. The book offers essays on a variety of writers -- Tolstoy, Andre Gide, William James, Stendhal, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Defoe, Marx and Nietzsche -- as well as epistolary essays to Milosz’s friend and fellow writer Jerzy Andrzejewski.

Milosz, when he was in his early 30s, wrote “Legends” during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. His output was extraordinary, given the wartime conditions. At the same time, he collected and published “Invincible Song,” a legendary underground volume of resistance poems. He also published -- in mimeograph form -- his own sequence, “The World: A Naive Poem,” which in part portrays art and literature heroically (even if his ultimate intent was ironic):

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A high forehead, and above it tousled hair

On which a ray of sun falls from the window.

And so father wears a bright fluffy crown

When he spreads before him a huge book.

His gown is patterned like that of a wizard.

Softly, he murmurs his incantations.

Only he whom God instructs in magic

Will learn what wonders are hidden in this book.

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But the artist and his world are decidedly different in “Legends of Modernity.” Europe, as Milosz described it in 1942, had become a social, intellectual and spiritual hell, and neither religion nor any ideology could solve the problem. The voice in the essays is strong, clear and analytical but becomes biting, passionate and enraged in his letters to Andrzejewski:

“So here we were, fated to live somehow in this time of feverish and vain trying on of all the old costumes with which we tried to cover all our pitiful nakedness. Socialism had turned wormy and fallen apart; the idea of democracy had perished; Catholicism had been transformed into a desiccated mummy ... philosophy was drowning in conventionalism and fictionalism, while Marxism ‘of the general line’ jeered mercilessly at the rotting of western Europe -- the bastard son, marked with the same stain of disease and degeneracy as its mother, who had rocked him in the arms of Hegels and Marxes.”

Although Milosz does not go so far as to blame writers exclusively for this bleak situation, his analysis illuminates how works of literature reflect mythologies, “legends,” that have a profound effect on a culture. Milosz is particularly interested in the value given to human desires as the measure of truth. In his youth, he was inspired by William James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” but he found the cultural impact on Europe of James and his pragmatism was disturbing.

His sharpest criticism, however, is reserved for the way Stendhal, Nietzsche, Gide and others set forth ideals of absolute freedom and liberation in their writings that are as much myths as the social constraints these authors suggest must be overcome. In the ambitions of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel in “The Red and the Black” and in Nietzsche’s contempt for the herd, Milosz saw pre-paranoids who misunderstood the constraints of society just as Don Quixote mistook windmills for giants.

“Did he not notice,” Milosz asks of Nietzsche, challenging his formulation of the will to power, “that the crowd was already made up of supermen just like him, just as abused and filled with hate?”

For Milosz, Gide -- whom he considers a high priest of “the rapture of self-liberation” -- bears definite responsibility for the horrors of war in the 20th century: “Artists are no less capable of wreaking destruction and ruin than the cold calculations of strategists.... What are the speeches of dictators made of -- dictators accompanied by the applause of millions? ... They have to be preceded by the work of scholars and artists; then the popularizer takes them over. Thanks to this process, they are lively and complex enough so that the ordinary man, deafened by their roar, cannot distinguish their falseness.”

In his letters, Milosz can be particularly concise and penetrating . Tracing in detail the effect of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and others, Milosz sees two roads that eventually converge into one pernicious way of looking at humankind: There was, on the one hand, “observing man as a biological creature” (the way of the Nazis) and, on the other, “looking at man as a social creature” and “reducing consciousness to the level of a tool.”

Either way, Milosz saw in World War II a break with civilization that had been coming for a long time -- not simply a political break but one that was also the embodiment of the ideas of insatiable liberation and cruel reduction that he found in its writers. In considering the difference between the experience of war as depicted by Tolstoy in “War and Peace” and what he was witnessing of World War II, Milosz saw his own moment as one in which “everything collapses”: “All possible perspectives for contemplating man disappear,” he said, except “the biological one.”

Readers of Milosz’s poetry and essays know his complex arguments with writers too eager to praise biology and nature. He admired the American poet Robinson Jeffers but never found comfort in his Lucretian acceptance of the biological order. Milosz devoted an entire book, “The Land of Ulro,” to the effects of science on the religious and literary imagination. For Milosz, a complex and often seemingly heretical Catholic, the fact that God created Earth and yet permitted cruelty and torture could not be readily reconciled by theology. In “Legends of Modernity,” we can see some of the roots of Milosz’s concern for too much fascination with what he would sometimes call “the demon science” of biology.

In the letters section of the book, Andrzejewski provides an important foil to Milosz’s relentless skepticism. Andrzejewski asserts his belief in human solidarity as a “concept of an ethical norm.” But Milosz counters in a return letter, calling him a “moralist.” Milosz preferred contradictions to answers.

Here, in these exchanges, we have a preview -- by little more than a decade -- of “The Captive Mind,” with its portrait of Andrzejewski as “Alpha, the Moralist.” While Milosz went into self-imposed exile in 1950s France, Andrzejewski stayed in Poland and became one of the Communist regime’s “official” literary voices (later, in the 1960s, he recanted and became a dissident). In “Legends,” Milosz points and blames. But he’s also unable to trust himself, as he writes in one letter: “Evil has become complicated, it has become more clever and sly, and he who wants to confront it must arm himself with equivalent perspicacity.” In the book’s last letter, Milosz reveals the pressures of historicism on his own thought: “We are so marked by social and historical thinking that the sphere of impersonal and superhuman truth appears to us an excessively cold and inhospitable space.”

In this inhospitable realm, a precarious balance of poetry and art, beauty and truth was vital, Milosz stressed, even though it could not keep a civilization from madness. Milosz’s last book of poems (published posthumously) honors this realm with its title, “Second Space.” Wandering in the ruins of positivism, irrationalism, pragmatism, fascism and communism, and allergic to action except through the irreconcilable contradictions possible in art, Milosz continued for six decades after the war to remain in passionate pursuit of the real.