Czeslaw Milosz - had a conversation with John Paul II about his poetry

In the latest Paris Review, Czeslaw Milosz said to his interviewer,

“Writing religious poetry in the 20th Century is very difficult. We are in a largely postreligious world. I had a conversation with the present pope, who commented upon some of my work, in particular my ‘Six Lectures in Verse.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you make one step forward, one step back.’ I answered, ‘Holy Father, how in the 20th Century can one write religious poetry differently?’ ”

“And how did the pope respond?” Milosz’s interviewer asked.

“He smiled,” said Milosz.

Milosz’s Paris Review interviewer, Robert Faggen, teaches modern poetry and American literature at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. When we talked recently, Faggen mentioned that Milosz has twice visited his English classes. “On one visit, he came off the plane and wanted to tell me about The Maverick Poets, published by Gorilla Press in San Diego. He recited from ‘Notice’ by Steve Kowit, who edited the book. Milosz just loved the line in ‘Notice,’ ‘I whose Levi’s ripped at the crotch.’ He was laughing and laughing. He has a wonderful sense of play and irony and also an ability to surprise you with what he is reading, what he allows himself to be attracted to. He doesn’t seem imprisoned by anybody’s taste.”

I asked Mr. Faggen if he was nervous, as he gathered notebooks and tape recorder and headed for Milosz’s house in the Berkeley Hills. He hesitated before he answered. “Milosz is someone who knows enough and is serious enough that 1 felt somewhat uncertain about how to approach him. 1 suppose there was some fear, fear that I would tread in unsubtle ways on very serious matters. Milosz is not a chitchat meister. And, he’s very discreet in certain ways.”

Mr. Faggen added, “In talking with some people, I think they have found Milosz rather stubborn. And one can understand that anybody who put up with communists and Nazis and got out of it and has maintained his Catholicism and his stature as a poet in the age of the aesthete and the nihilist, has to be rather stubborn.”

I asked Mr. Faggen about Milosz’s house.

“White, two-story, hidden by redwoods and firs. There is a study off the ground floor which is piled high in books in Polish, French, Russian, and English. In his study he has a little Apple computer, a large photograph of his first wife, and a photograph of the pope.”

Mr. Faggen has a long-standing interest in the fate of the literary and religious imagination in a culture dominated by scientific thought. “Which,” he said, “is how I got to Milosz. 1 had read very little of him and was looking through his Norton lectures, later published as The Witness of Poetry. One lecture, ‘The Lesson of Biology,’ seemed to deal directly with this problem,” a problem, Mr. Faggen added, with which relatively few contemporary poets seem concerned.

This lecture led Mr. Faggen to Milosz’s poetry. “I found that Milosz was deeply concerned with the problem of relying on Nature as Scripture, as a system of symbols. As a student of American literature, in which the American wilderness has been made holy, in which Nature is read as New Scripture, as source of revelation, Milosz’s recognition that there are both moral and epistemological problems with reading Nature struck me as being at the heart of the problem of modern thought.”

Modern poets, Mr. Faggen explained, have tended not to write about Nature, “because it is assumed that Nature is uninterpretable or unknowable, or, if knowable, quite brutal. I think that the swing in the other direction, toward the purely aesthetic — that the world is uninterpretable and the mind is constantly in flux, so one might as well project changing subjective constellations onto the blank screen of the world — is, of course, a form of nihilism.

“The exciting thing about Milosz is that while being fully aware of this set of problems, he nonetheless believes that the world is the veil of an eternal reality. He also believes that there is such a thing as reality and not merely the pragmatic effusions of mind and psychological trouble. [In The Witness of Poetry, Milosz argues that true poetry is “the passionate pursuit of the Real.”] So, here he is, in American culture, really coming from a perspective that is very different.”

In the interview, did Milosz surprise Mr. Faggen?

“Yes. For instance, in talking about American television, one would think that his complaints would be about television’s stupidity or insipidity. But what he said was, ‘The thing I don’t like most about television are nature programs.’ For Americans to hear that is startling. Because we know nature programs are on PBS, and there’s usually a reverential narrative voice. But Milosz made the point that the edifying tone of those programs does not necessarily alert, but rather lulls the viewer into not being reminded that Nature is a shop of horrors.”

Milosz, said Mr. Faggen, “of course is concerned with the question of what kind of God could have created a world in which there is such violence and horror, the Job problem. When I asked, ‘Do you think God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind is adequate?’ there was no hesitation in his answer. He said vehemently, ‘It is not adequate, it is not adequate.’ ”

On a lighter note, Don Bauder wrote recently in the San Diego Union-Tribune that only ten years ago, J. David “Jerry” Dominelli pleaded guilty to stripping investors of $80 million through a Ponzi scheme. Dominelli was sentenced to 20 years and, according to Bauder, will be released from Boron Federal Prison Camp on February 13, 1996. During the early '80s, Dominelli, together with Alan Alda, Brooke Astor, and William S. Paley, was a major financial supporter of the Paris Review. A 1984 Neil Morgan column in the San Diego Tribune noted that Dominelli’s contribution “was the work of George Mitrovich, whom Dominelli hired because ‘he knows everybody and reads everything.’ ” In 1987, Tom Blair reported in his San Diego Union column that “in headier days, Dominelli dumped some $50,000 into the Paris Review.

The Paris Review, a quarterly, can be purchased at local bookstores, $10 for a single issue, or by subscription, $34 per year, or $1000 for a lifetime subscription, by writing 45-39 171st Place, Flushing, NY 11358.