The Collected Prose, page 2
The political thaw that followed Stalin’s death made it possible for Herbert—and a number of his gifted contemporaries—to publish a first poetry collection in 1956 without compromise to censorship. Herbert rapidly followed his debut Chord of Light with a sizeable second collection, Hermes, Dag and Star, roughly half of which was made up of prose poems. In 1958, the young poet with a growing reputation received a stipend from the Ministry of Culture for travel in Western Europe, and Herbert set out on his first expedition to France, Italy and England. In Paris he formed important friendships with members of the Polish émigré community, notably with the artists Józef Czapski and Jan Lebenstein, and with Czeslaw Milosz, who was both mentor and rival to him, an increasingly difficult combination in the years that followed.
These wanderings, from which he returned to Poland in 1960, resulted in the essay collection Barbarian in the Garden, published in Warsaw in 1962. In a brief preface to the book, Herbert wrote that he thought of the book simply as an “account of a journey”:
The first, a real journey to cities, museums and ruins. The other a journey through books on the places I visited. The two ways of seeing, the two methods, are interwoven.
I didn’t choose the easier form of an impressionistic diary, because in the end that would only lead to a litany of adjectives and aesthetic exaltation. I thought that I should convey a certain amount of information on remote civilizations, and given that I am not an expert but an amateur, I refrained from all the delights of erudition: bibliography, notes, indices. I set out to write a book for reading, not for scholarly study. In art I am interested in the timeless value of a work (Piero della Francesca’s eternity), its technical structure (how stone is laid upon stone in a Gothic cathedral) and its connection to history. Because the lion’s share of the book is devoted to the Middle Ages, I decided to include two historical essays, on the Albigensians and the Templars, which speak of the sound and fury of the era.
If I had to choose an epigraph for the whole book, I would take a sentence from Malraux:
“That evening, while Rembrandt is still sketching, all the famous shades and shadows of the cave painters closely follow his wavering hand, which will grant them a new afterlife or a new oblivion”.
The essays in Barbarian are also a roughly chronological journey, from the prehistoric caves of Lascaux to the Greek presence in Italy in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, to the Romans in Arles in the 1st century AD, to the six pieces centered on the late medieval era and early Renaissance, capped with a final tour of Northern France spiked with epigraphs from Rousseau and Nerval, who bring us up to the modern age. Caves, reintroduced into eighteenth century gardens at Ermenonville as refuges from the corruption of human society, bring the narrative full circle. Cities like Paris, with its “chatter of lights” become sites which one must flee if one wishes to preserve one’s sensitivities. Only art—the “warm touch of the Lascaux painter”—can make human beings feel briefly at home in a world ‘rushing towards death’.
In the 1960s, Herbert again spent long stretches of time in Paris, making it his base for an expedition to Greece and Italy in the fall of 1964 with his friends Zbigniew and Magdalena Czajkowski, and marrying Katarzyna Dzieduszycka at the Polish Consulate in Paris in 1968. The Greek excursion led to another series of essays, most of them published in Polish journals between 1966 and 1973, but put out as a book, Labyrinth on the Sea (1999), only after Herbert’s death. Why the manuscript of Labyrinth languished in the editorial offices of the publishing house Czytelnik in Warsaw from 1972 to 1981 is difficult to prove—but it is not hard to make an educated guess. During the 70’s Herbert had become increasingly engaged in political protest in Poland, and in that period his name appeared on a list of authors subject to censorship. Mr Cogito (1974) was the last book he published at Czytelnik; archive research has shown that one poem intended for inclusion in that collection, “Mr Cogito’s Heraldic Meditations” was removed by the censor. No censor would have been pleased to run into himself, even transposed to Periclean Athens, as he would have reading “The Samos Affair”:
It is a thing worth reflecting on that the immediate consequence of the Samian war was the introduction of censorship—the first in Athenian history—which forbade comic poets to represent persons on stage under their true names…. It testifies to a profound internal crisis beginning to show.
The drastic controls on freedom of speech prove that the popular mood must have in fact been quite different from the official enthusiasm and optimism.
After martial law was declared in December 1981, Herbert did not publish anything he wrote with state publishers but instead published with émigré or underground presses, until the dissolution of the Communist regime in 1989.
Like Barbarian, Labyrinth traces a path forward in time (and geographically northward) from a prehistoric culture—the Minoans of Crete—through the Mycenean era up to the summit of classical Greece, the Acropolis, to the Etruscans in Italy and the Romans in England. The two collections share an acute interest in changing conceptions of beauty, in patterns of conquest, empire and decline, and in the manifold ways the past is discovered, invented or erased by successive generations. In his encounter with Greece, Herbert deepens his search for the sources of European civilization, while focusing more squarely on the nature of myth, its porous border with history, and its relation to physical landscape. He also continues a meditation, initiated in Barbarian, on the coexistence of cruelty and aesthetic refinement in human cultures. The apparent paradox of the Inquisition being born at the same time as the masterpieces of Gothic architecture receives a more emblematic statement in the image of the Etruscans flogging their slaves to musical accompaniment.
Herbert’s essays do not attempt to formulate any systematic theory of culture. The closest he comes to a general view is concisely put toward the end of his short essay “Animula”: I always wished I would never lose the belief that great works of the spirit are more objective than we are. And that they will judge us. Among the “great works of the spirit” he counts both myths and made objects. His aim is to be a conduit of cultural tradition, in his words, to “exert my whole sensibility and understanding so that the Acropolis, the cathedrals, the Mona Lisa would be repeated in me.” This striving is linked here (and in the poem “Mona Lisa”) to a sense of guilt for having survived the war in which so many exact contemporaries had perished. He concludes the essay with a view of tradition that echoes T. S. Eliot’s famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” with an added political twist:
There exists a false view to the effect that tradition is like a fortune, a legacy, which we inherit mechanically, without effort, and that is why those who object to inherited wealth and unearned privileges are against tradition. But in fact every contact with the past requires an effort, a labor, and a difficult and thankless labor to boot, for our little ‘I’ whines and balks at it.
Although the reference to the Communist world is unmistakable here, Herbert engages in cultural criticism of a kind that can often be just as easily understood to refer to the West as to “People’s Poland.” Herbert’s contact with the West (and the liberal cultural movements of the sixties) prompted a hardening of his attitude toward the avantgarde, or the radical left as manifest in culture and art. This was particularly true of the time he spent in the United States.
In 1968, Herbert’s Selected Poems in English appeared at Penguin, and he made his first transatlantic journey, giving readings in New York, Berkeley and Los Angeles. He returned to the U.S. for the academic year of 1970–1971 as a visiting professor of European literature at what was then California State College in Los Angeles. While in California, he formed warm friendships with a number of American poets, Philip Levine and Henri Coulette among them, and although he did not report on America in essay form, the poet Larry Levis, who at that time taught at Cal State, left an account of his encounters with Herbert in Los Angeles. Lecture notes left in Herbert’s archive bear witness to the time and attention he devoted to his students at the college, despite his rather stunned response to the limitations of their education. Alongside his classes, he also held informal meetings with aspiring poets, which he by all accounts greatly enjoyed. But unlike Czeslaw Milosz (by then settled in Berkeley) who found in America’s literature and above all its natural world an enduring fascination and inspiration, Herbert’s interests and projects remained anchored in Europe.
Traces of the American experience can be found in later writings, as for example in a talk he gave at a Polish poetry festival in 1972, “The Poet in Face of the Present”.
A few months ago I returned from America; the necessity of “engagement” came up regularly in private conversations with my American friends. The term itself is vague enough to put one off using it. The majority of young people in the West who dabble in film, art, or literature, loudly declare they are on the side of the “Left”—variously understood, or rather, read. And I often wonder why the work that results from this essentially noble stance is intellectually immature, as if the proclamation of humanist ideals led the artist into the realm of banality.
This talk was given in the context of arguing against a tendency among the younger “New Wave” poets in Poland to make their anti-Communist stance the main content of their poems. The polemic gave rise to one of Herbert’s finest poems, “To Ryszard Krynicki—A Letter,” which affirms the duty of poets to rise above the level of politics, no matter how just their political cause. His confrontational relations with the younger poets—Adam Zagajewski, Stanislaw Baranczak and Ryszard Krynicki among them—gradually developed into warm friendships and differing degrees of mentorship.
After a few years back in Poland, in 1975 Herbert and his wife again decamped, this time to Berlin, where they remained until early 1981. Herbert had more of an intellectual community in Berlin than in the United States, and he was warmly embraced as a poet in Germany, and before long also in Holland. In 1976, Herbert made a first visit to the Netherlands, where he participated in the Poetry International festival in Rotterdam and visited museums in Amsterdam and other cities. Dutch art and culture became Herbert’s next major object of fascination and study, and in the course of the following decade and a half (with another Dutch visit in 1988) he wrote the essays in Still-Life with a Bridle, which appeared in Poland in 1993. Here Herbert brings to light the submerged passions of an apparently staid and sober culture, rendering vividly the drama of water, the drama of commerce, science, and, in the title essay, the dramatic biography of Torrentius, a painter of the most becalmed of genres, the still-life. In Dutch culture, with its anti-heroic bent, Herbert finds myth almost entirely subsumed by objects—the new heroes—and the gods and theologies of the Greeks and Italians stripped down to the bare, hushed interior of a Calvinist church and the dry QED’s of Spinoza. Herbert is fascinated by the tension between the Dutch passion for material goods (often involving foreign conquest) and their religious rationalism and austerity, by the way the mystical impulse, banished from spiritual life, entered the life of science and commerce. In his essay “The Bitter Smell of Tulips” he expresses his particular fondness for “follies in the sanctuaries of reason.” Herbert’s last trip abroad, undertaken when his health was in severe decline, was a last visit to Amsterdam to see an exhibition on 17th century “tulipmania” at the Nieuwe Kerk, one of the city’s largest cathedrals.
ALTHOUGH HERBERT CONSIDERED HIMSELF lucky to be able to travel widely during a period when freedoms were so severely curtailed or denied without appeal to the vast majority of his fellow Poles, it is important to realize the difficulties accompanying these travels and the unwanted attention they attracted. The application for a visa for foreign travel was a long and tortuous process requiring not only long queues, arbitrary waiting periods and tedious forms, but also unpleasant encounters with the security police. A postcard to Katarzyna, sent in France in 1958, shows that Herbert thought he was already under surveillance. In a letter to Czeslaw Milosz, written in 1969, Herbert described an interrogation to which he was subjected upon returning to Poland from France.
I hadn’t expected to feel the touch of the gentlemen in little black suits. They phoned me on the day after I arrived* (it was Easter and I thought “they” too would be eating sausage and drinking). Then there were regular daily “conversations” lasting many hours, not at headquarters God forbid but at the top of the Metropol hotel with a window open on the courtyard. I could go out the window and not come back and my friends would say I’d been drunk, that I’d always had nihilistic tendencies, there you go. […] They were interested in many things, among them Trotskyite movements in the West, but mainly the émigré’s, whom they would most like to lure into their pit. They asked me all about you too, whether you might not come back, and I summarized The Issa Valley for them and analyzed your poetry, pretending you interested them as the best living Polish poet. I played the fool, but it was no fun. I was alarmed to find that I wasn’t used to it anymore, that I wasn’t good at strolling around with shit on my head, and that I’m a coward because I fear for the rest of my life. It made me sick (insomnia, depression) but I’m fine now and working.
Naturally, there were also economic constraints: although Herbert first went abroad in 1958 on a grant from the Ministry of Culture, the sums he disposed of were modest indeed. His essays give occasional glimpses of the circumstances under which he made his pilgrimages to ancient sites and great art collections, and the ways he found to extend his meager resources over as many days and miles as possible, as on Crete, “more frugally than ever dividing my melting drachmas, to trick fate out of one more day, two more days….” He travels on crowded buses and trains, subsists on humble (but tasty) meals and sleeps in cheap hostels, doing without cabs, rental cars, complimentary soaps, and other luxuries. His essays are constructed from copious notes and sketches made in museums, libraries and at the sites of ruins, churches, battlefields, as well as at the various public establishments where he sits recovering from hours of wandering, watching locals go about their daily lives, and interacting with them as naturally as a traveler’s odd status permits.
One model traveler for Herbert is Montaigne, as we discover from a brief essay of 1966, “Monsieur Montaigne’s Voyage to Italy.” Although Montaigne seems less interested in art than in the gastronomies and technologies of the regions he visits, he has the gift of “perspicacity and curiosity,” the ability to listen with unfailing attention to “everyone and everything.” Herbert particularly values encounters with what he calls the “inimitable, individual beauty of life,” which he feels has become elusive to modern travelers, who move too rapidly across continents and whose experience is at every point mediated by timid convention and commercial cliché. In his own travels, he continually courts the “benign divinities of Nature and Accident,” delighting in ferry delays, storms at sea, outdated guidebooks, inaccurate directions, unplanned meetings, unexpected glimpses of the raw edges of life; he seeks to recover the living emotion with which earlier human beings might have regarded the great edifices or landscapes with which they dwelled.
Herbert is everywhere in his prose engaged in a polemic against ways of reading and writing history he considers false—whether narrow, petty, self-indulgent, expedient, naïve or cynical. He is everywhere alert to history written under the spell of what Czeslaw Milosz (in The Captive Mind) called the “Hegelian sting”: the temptation to see force triumphant as historical necessity. In the talk “The Presence of History,” given in Germany around 1975, as in the essay in Barbarian in the Garden entitled “Defense of the Templars,” Herbert uses the Hegelian notion of the “high tribunal of history,” to assert the duty of a chronicler of historical events to “weigh the sacrifice” of those who fought in vain for ideals or principles. Herbert knows better than most that the viewpoint of history’s underdogs is not by definition truer than that of its usual narrators, the conquerors. But the voices on both sides must be heard, and Herbert is always keen to take on the defense of the noble loser. Human acts have a certain weight, which it is a historian’s task to register, without pretence of perfect objectivity, to the full reach of his or her faculties of reason and empathy. When professional historians neglect this task, others must pick up the slack. Otherwise the field will be stampeded by demagogues seeking to justify their own power plays or “inspire” peoples to violent acts by feeding them distorted tales of ancestral battles, triumphs and humiliations. And quite apart from any practical application, the act of doing justice to the past (speaking of it justly) is a consolation for the irredeemable losses of history and, for Herbert, a value in itself requiring no justification.
DURING A STRETCH OF time partly overlapping with the composition of Still Life with a Bridle, Herbert also worked on a collection of short prose pieces which re-imagine and fill out ancient myths; the project was left unfinished but a version of it was published posthumously as The King of the Ants. The pieces are not linked directly to travel, but may be traced back to Herbert’s early “character sketches,” to the prose poems or fables included in his volumes of poetry, and to the “apocryphas” of Still Life. The editor of the Polish edition of King of the Ants, Ryszard Krynicki, attempting to reconstruct the complicated history of the project, points to a handwritten booklet with the title Bajki (Fables), put together by Herbert and given to a friend in 1953, as evidence that the poet’s life was from the very outset accompanied and fed by experiments in fabular prose. Krynicki points to Berlin and 1979 or 1980 as the probable place and time of origin for King of the Ants, which Herbert first called Atlas and furnished with epigraphs from Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas. The work may be seen as Herbert’s own Who’s Who of received heroes, or as a manual for de-and reconstructing myths; for Krynicki it is, in any case, a summary of an essential theme in his writing, as well as one of Herbert’s most personal works.
