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Milosz and His Fans

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April 8, 1995

Dear Mr. Creedon,

Thank you for your letter of March 18, 1995. The first requirement to become a
writer is to get a good education, possibly with a knowledge of classical languages
—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, a training in history of philosophy, and world literature.
The rest will follow.
Sincerely,
Czesław Miłosz

For five years I worked part-time for the poet and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz at his home in
the Berkeley Hills. Miłosz was seventy-nine when I started taking dictation in Polish and
teacups English, helping him answer queries and invitations, mostly finding ways to say “no” in the
drawing by stef lenk gentlest of tones. Every so often though, I’d get to transcribe a gem like the letter above.
from Brick 82
Once a week I caught the bus to 978 Grizzly Peak Boulevard. Miłosz would greet me at the door,
shake my hand with a slight bow, and invite me to his study. By then he had a facial tic: his
shaggy eyebrows twitched up and down as he talked. Carol, his American second wife, a lovely,
funny woman with a southern twang, would bring Miłosz a glass of vodka. I’d whip out my
steno notebook and get to work. Several hours later, Miłosz or Carol would drive me home, a
steep descent and a slightly unnerving experience when Miłosz was at the wheel. The view was
glorious—often the sun was setting over San Francisco Bay—but I would silently fret about the
brakes on his mid-1980s sedan, and the odd headline a mishap might inspire.

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent.
Enough labor for one human life.

— Czesław Miłosz, Road-side Dog

At the top of his property near the street, Miłosz had a carriage house that he rented out to
graduate students, including the sociologist Ted, with whom I fell in love, and, when Ted moved
out to live with me, my old friend AnneMarie, a lawyer-in-training. Neither of them had much
use for poetry or deference to the landlord called by Joseph Brodsky one of the greatest poets of
our time. AnneMarie referred to him as “Cheesy Meatloaf”—her approximation of his Polish
name. But she was impressed by the gold medallion that rested on a side table next to the phone
in the living room. I’m pretty sure any visitor who used the phone took a surreptitious moment
to trace the visage of Alfred Nobel and hold that orb up to the light. When Miłosz went to the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a year as a writer-in-residence, leaving Ted in

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charge of his cat and his rhododendrons, the medallion remained in situ, just another
knick-knack amid the piles of books and papers. Miłosz himself was not much impressed.

Another part of my job was to open and sort the mail, setting aside the letters from Miłosz’s
admirers. I wondered about the crumbs tucked into letters from his Polish readers. Later it
dawned on me that they were the bruised remains of communion wafers after a journey
through the international post. Miłosz dutifully signed blank cards for autograph seekers and
sent photos of himself when requested. He didn’t reply to everyone, but some letters caught his
fancy, and he would strike up a correspondence—as with this aspiring writer, whose intelligence
and longing jump out from the page:

Guilin, Guangxi 541001

P.R. China
October 14, 1993

Dear Mr. Miłosz,

. . . Perhaps having read western literature and philosophy too much, I appear to be a
stranger in my own country. Now, I try hard to improve my English writing ability,
hoping to express deeply my understandings of Chinese culture in Standard English
someday.
As I have longed to be writer from a child, it is not my end to come to America to
study Engineering, but I have no other choice. In China, it is difficult to change one’s
occupation, at the same time, I am not willing to waste nine hours in a factory every day.
I wish I will be admitted to a literary school to read William Faulkner, to study his cycle
of stories about Yoknapatawpha County.
I have enjoyed reading an essay excerpted from “Native Realm: A Search for
Self-Definition.” Would you please send me this book? For an ordinary Chinese youth
like me, it is impossible to obtain any of the original masterpieces. I have taught myself
Spanish in order to read Garcia Marquez, for example, but I never get “One Hundred
Years of Solitude.”
With kindest regards,
Wei Rui

I kept a copy of Wei’s letter because I planned to look him up one day. Did the extraordinary
youth from Guangxi, a mountainous region in the far southwest of China, become a Faulkner
scholar? I don’t know. The answer might lie in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at
Yale University, where Miłosz’s archive now resides.

Sometimes the correspondence had odd results, as in the case of a young fan in her early
twenties from Japan. She had clearly read Miłosz’s work—her letters were lucid, full of emotion
and insight, written in perfect English. Then one day she showed up at Grizzly Peak Boulevard
and rang the carriage house bell. Miłosz and Carol were living in North Carolina that year, and
Ted answered the door. The woman introduced herself and asked to see her fiancé, explaining
that she had travelled all the way from Japan to marry Miłosz. In a panic, Ted called me and we
managed to track down one of Miłosz’s sons, who lived in the Bay Area. After many hours of
negotiation with the Japanese Embassy and the woman’s family back in Japan, a car arrived to
whisk her away. She never had a chance to lay eyes on her beloved. A few months later, a
package from her arrived. Miłosz asked me to open it and describe the contents. It was a trove
of pastel-coloured sweets, wrapped in exquisite papers, emanating a subtle perfume.

The indignities of aging were on the poet’s mind. He was translating the poems of Anna Swir
(aka Świrszczyńska, 1909–1984), his friend from Warsaw, into English in collaboration with
Leonard Nathan. Swir wrote about what happens when bodies decay and disappoint, and
Miłosz admired her candour, rare for a Polish woman of her generation. His own writing from
this period onward is full of such meditations. “They were betrayed by their bodies, once
beautiful and ready to dance. Yet in every one a lamp of consciousness is burning, hence their
wonder: ‘Is this me? But it can’t be so!’”

Still, the world rose up to smooth the poet’s path. One of the perks of being a Nobel laureate at
University of California, Berkeley—at that time there were about fifteen, Miłosz the only winner

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in a non-scientific field—is your own parking space on campus for life. Miłosz also had the
privilege of scoring a table at a moment’s notice at the wildly popular restaurant Chez Panisse.
In Berkeley these were fairy-tale prizes, like flying carpets or enchanted pots that never run out
of porridge.

Over the phone in the fall of 1990, Miłosz described where to catch the bus to his house and
cautioned me about the many “lacunae” in the bus schedule. I knew then I’d caught the golden
ring of part-time jobs. In between letters I jotted down a few of his asides. I’ve saved my
notebooks, which is why I can quote from them twenty-five years later. Once, Miłosz looked at
me as I was writing and said, “I used to be left-handed too, but they beat it out of me.” On
Joseph Brodsky: “he is a genius”; Robert Frost: “marvellous”; the Laments by Renaissance poet
Jan Kochanowski: “should be ranked with the world classics”; and my favourite: “these poems
are awful” (I can’t say whose).

Miłosz and Carol were away for the year of 1991–92. I collected the mail and sent it to Chapel
Hill. Ted was in charge of watering the bushes of the main house and tending to the needs of
Tiny, the ancient Russian Blue who appears once or twice in the Miłosz oeuvre—both as himself
and as a representative of the violent animal world. Through our weekly tryst at Miłosz’s aerie,
Ted and I had become a couple, complete with grey cat, like the “Old World Landowners” from
Nikolai Gogol’s short story of that name. When the eighty-one-year-old Master finally arrived
back at his Berkeley home, he immediately noticed the dying rhododendrons and Tiny’s untidy
litter box and was annoyed. Miłosz climbed back up the flagstone path to the carriage house and
commenced a dressing-down. Later that evening he returned, this time to offer Ted a heartfelt
apology the way only Miłosz could—eyebrows twitching, a humble bow of the head.

After Carol’s death from cancer in 2002, Miłosz wrote an elegy for her, “Orpheus and Eurydice”
(translated by Miłosz and Robert Hass). It was one of his last poems before his death in 2004 at
the age of ninety-three.

He remembered her words: “You are a good man.”

He did not quite believe it. Lyric poets
Usually have—as he knew—cold hearts.
It is like a medical condition. Perfection in art
Is given in exchange for such an affliction.

Only her love warmed him, humanized him.

When he was with her, he thought differently about himself.
He could not fail her now, when she was dead.

I suspect it was Carol’s idea to bring us a wedding present (a wooden tray) and send another gift
upon the birth of our son in February 1996, after we had moved to Oregon. But I am certain that
Miłosz picked out the second gift, which arrived at Christmas: The World of Pooh: The
Complete Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, by A. A. Milne. The title page
carries an inscription in the poet’s hand: “To Nicholas Wesling Gerber, that you may enjoy it as
I did. Czesław Miłosz. Dec. 4, 1996.” Miłosz was fifteen years old and living in rural Lithuania
when Winnie-the-Pooh was first published in 1926. Exactly when did he enjoy it? Did he fall for
Piglet, Owl, and Pooh while practising English in his teens, or much later, in exile, while reading
to his own two sons? I neglected to read Winnie-the-Pooh to my children. The small bear of
little brain was no match for the modern British wizard-boy who saved the world from evil time
and again. I regret now the missed opportunity to dwell for a time in the Hundred Acre Wood,
where fears are an ordinary part of life but do not linger in our nightmares like Dementors.

Miłosz had occasion to think about Winnie-the-Pooh the year my son was born. In April 1996,
he remarked on “the news of the death, at age seventy-five, of Christopher Robin Milne,
immortalized in a book by his father . . . as Christopher Robin.” In the brief meditation from
Road-side Dog titled “Christopher Robin,” Miłosz wrote:

Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully
deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what
happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came

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back and then I asked him about the well. “Old bear,” he answered. “I was in it and I
was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person, I wore
trousers down to the ground, I had a gray beard, then I grew old, hunched, and I walked
with a cane, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only
real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won’t go anywhere, even if I’m
called for an afternoon snack.”

He begins in the voice of “old bear” from the house at Pooh Corner. But then the dead boy
speaks; Christopher Robin is the poet, come back to reassure us that growing old and dying is
probably just a dream, and anyway, he isn’t going anywhere. Probably this is why we cling to
what our poets say.

Like what you read? Want more? Order your copy of Brick 95 today and get
to-your-door delivery!

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