In A Year of the Hunter, Czesław Miłosz has chosen the diary as the form to continue the quest that has defined his poetic enterprise, “the passionate pursuit of the real.” Always concerned with the question, “How to tell it all?” which he posed in his poetic sequence “Six Lectures in Verse,” Miłosz constantly seeks new and expanded forms to embrace as much of the world as possible, as well as the conflicting personalities that grip him. Miłosz does believe in an objective reality beyond the impressions and memories of the observer, but he also is acutely aware that the observer is extremely malleable, subject to different moods, preferences, and voices.
What makes this diary particularly interesting is Miłosz’s constant negotiation between himself and the world beyond himself. The diary tells readers little or nothing about the time in which it is written—from 1987 to 1988—and little about the quotidian details of the author’s life. Although he tells readers that his marriage to his first and late wife, Janka, is the central fact of his life and makes general observations about its tensions, Miłosz is reluctant to say too much about it, not only in the interest of his own privacy, but also out of fairness to a woman who can no longer respond. Nor does Miłosz engage in elaborate reconstructions of the turbulence through which he has lived, particularly the Warsaw occupation, even though he points to the ways in which those times have been inadequately rendered. The diary is the extremely complex and ironic self-portrait of a man in conflict with the various masks and postures with which history has tempted him: Nobel Laureate and ambassador of letters, great humanist, the poet of Polish liberation, a master artist. In short, Miłosz presents himself as neither simple nor noble, but a believer and a seeker who struggles to transcend the torture of self-consciousness, the traps of modern nihilistic shibboleths, and his own moral failings.
As a concise, almost formal experiment, limited to one year, A Year of the Hunter can be viewed as a response to Witold Gombrowicz’s brilliant three-volume Dziennik (1957-1966; Diary, 1988-1993), in which Miłosz appeared frequently. In particular, Gombrowicz’s observation in the entry of April, 1966, that in “consciousness there is something like its being its own trap,” seems to haunt Miłosz with its assumptions of a purely subjective world constructed of initial, capricious associations. Aware of the power of this view and its horrific consequences, Miłosz nevertheless believes in “a sphere that endures independently of people’s fleeting interconnections,” and that in “this world, despite all its ghastliness, there is another side, a true side, a lining visible to the eyes of the Divinity.” A religion of pure art is an insufficient substitute for a deeper exploration of man’s place in the cosmos. Yet Miłosz is far too sensuous and worldly to be borne away by pure mysticism, and far too conscious of his own failings to allow himself transcendent freedom.
Throughout the diary, Miłosz in the present is what he has been all his life—a wanderer. As he travels from his home in Berkeley to readings and appearances throughout the world, his thoughts travel into his past, to his marriage to his first wife, Janka, his conflicts and arguments with other writers, the Warsaw occupation, his experiences at various periods in Paris. With his usual clarity and brilliance, Miłosz wonders about “the real Paris,” how it can be found beyond the shifting perspectives of the observer: “Where is the objective truth of this reality if this reality exhibits a myriad subjective hues? What does the eye of God see? This warehouse of subjective states, or some substratum, some ‘as it really is’?” This is Miłosz the eternal hunter who does not, in the fashionable postmodern stance, dismiss reality as a construct or a blank upon which to impose his fantasies, but grieves because reality always eludes his grasp as it disappears in the shifting sands of history.
The diary form allows him latitude in his presentation of self. Although guided by a single narrative persona, readers also see the different selves and voices contending with each other, even as Miłosz observes himself in different ways in the past and in the present. This polyphony has been a characteristic feature of some of his greatest poems, including “From the Rising of the Sun,” “The Separate Notebooks,” and “La Belle Epoque.” All the elements of observation, philosophic and theological reflection, and, above all else, portraits of fascinating people that have made his poetry unique are present here, with almost the same concision and only somewhat less lyricism: “The pleasure that I derive from this memoir: along with my old inclination to extract the essence (great events, currents, ideas), this time I am yielding to a fabric woven of specific people, of old and new events, which is, perhaps, for this very reason, closer to the tonalities (to fragments) of poetry.” Almost no modern poet seems so concerned with preserving the memory of those he admires from the annihilating forces of historical amnesia than Miłosz. Konstanty Galczynski, Kot Jelenski, Jaroslaw Iwaz-kiewicz, and Jozef Mackiewicz are a few of the writers to whom Miłosz devotes complicated and lavish meditations. Although they are writers with whom he has had strong disagreements, Miłosz recognizes how much he has learned from them and how the conflicts helped create his own polyphonic character.
Miłosz recognizes a futility, and even vanity, in trying to preserve the memory of others and of himself. This comes to him, however, as a devil’s temptation to give in to disregard of the individual human life, which he regards as the curse of this century’s statistical inhumanism. While always somewhat ashamed in taking his own life too seriously or as worthy of detailed attention, he also recognizes the hazards of devaluing a single human life, existing “once only from the beginning to the end of time”:
Relief may come with the thought that everything that one once was comes to an end with death, passes into eternity, that there is no responsibility, and he who remembers will also soon pass into eternity without a trace. But immediately, in opposition to that thought, an objection arises: let there be a judging, let there be the torment of self-knowledge, if only our belief in every moment of our life enduring somewhere, forever, can be proved true.
Miłosz suspects facile nihilists as escapists from the imperative of moral conscience, the “torment of self knowledge.” Miłosz wrestles constantly with his guilt over a variety of matters, while avoiding the self-indulgence and glorification of public self-flagellation. Constant moral self-suspicion is Miłosz’s mode, however, from which he allows himself little release: “The author of a diary would be well advised to remember Simone Weil’s aphorism: ‘All the good and all the evil that one thinks about oneself is false at the moment one thinks it. Therefore one must think only ill of oneself. And one need not know that it is false.’ ”
If the form of the diary leads readers to believe that there will be dark revelations, Miłosz gives few lurid ones. He wrestles with the question of how much he can reveal about himself without violating his own privacy, or creating spectacular diversions from the less glamorous but no less troubling faults of his life. Confession is crucial to Miłosz, but he is acutely aware that it can become a dishonest mode of expression, a series of evasions, an infinite regress of grandstanding and shame. The remarkable achievement of this book is the way in which Miłosz does not simply sacrifice his convictions, or even some of his arrogance, to a pervasive sense of guilt, nor allow others to become mere puppets in his own confessional theater.
No professional mourner, Miłosz has abandoned the subject of the Holocaust and the tragedies of history as fit subject matter for his poetry, although he is always skeptical of his own desire for detachment: “And what about my poetry? I wanted to scream, but at the same time knew that a scream is futile. While feeling guilty that I was not screaming.” While obviously sympathetic with the sufferings of Poland at the hands of foreign invaders, Miłosz consistently conveys his disdain for the self-serving distortions of nationalism. For Miłosz, nationalist sentiment is a sin that has produced great distortions in history and in the literature of history. He asserts several times that the full and true story of Poland during the occupation has not been written and gives readers instances and accounts that would indicate how much has not been told. Miłosz does not deny his own susceptibility to nationalist sentiment which he treats as virtually an unpardonable sin: “If I wanted to live longer it would be only to correct the evil that I have done. Including all my poems that promote that moaning-noble-patriotic Polish blockheadness. Or can be recited that way. . . . Only my bouts of national orthodoxy, not my flirtations with Communism, are stains that cannot be washed clean.”
Throughout A Year of the Hunter, Miłosz insists both to a Western but also, no doubt, to a Polish audience that suffering transcends the merely political. Miłosz may well be answering those in Poland who remained there under communist rule when he chose exile in Paris and then in the United States. If Miłosz wants to scream at all, it is the universal scream of Job directed against a God who permitted not only the great atrocities of World War II, but also the slow, lonely suffering that each human being experiences in death.
Although some Poles might regard his greatest sin as his decision to leave his own country, Miłosz recognizes in himself a “desire for elsewhere” as a greater “malady,” a word he used in the poem “To Raja Rao” to describe that desire. Miłosz has constantly struggled with the difference between the pursuit of a false utopia and the kingdom of God: “Somewhere else belongs to the chimeras of the mind that respond to certain of its needs. I myself received more than enough of an introduction to the power of those chimeras, chasing after them like a dog after a mechanical rabbit. In the dual meaning of the future and of the great capitals of culture. And I was just as snobbish—if not more so—about my Parisian tastes and my French as were the American expatriates.” From his journey to Paris in his youth, to his life there amid hostile intellectuals in the 1950’s, to his eventual settling in the United States, Miłosz has made his own predicament of exile a universal, akin to Adam and Eve leaving Paradise for a better world, only to find that the new one is fraught with trouble and the old not what they had thought it was. The desire for elsewhere becomes an unavoidable source of his torment and guilt, and his predicament encapsulates the warning given by Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851): “In the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
Miłosz’s hope is to transcend the world of infernal passions and conflicts, something he is wary cannot be done in the world without a certain inhuman arrogance. What Miłosz strives for and achieves in this book is a remarkable detachment, as he often observes himself with ironic detachment: “In self defense, I might cite Schopenhauer or Simone Weil: in relation to the past my contemplation is truthful, that is to say disinterested; in that sense I approach objectivity, although I will never achieve it.” Readers are given a few striking moments of Miłosz’s lack of detachment. One memorable moment is not by Miłosz himself, but contained in a letter he received from a woman who was once a high school classmate of his in Lithuania. She recounts how Miłosz chased a group of nationalist activists from an auditorium: “ ‘The ramp in Sniadecki Auditorium; you’re running ahead of a group of workers and students, chasing a nationalist fighting squad that wanted to break up an evening of poetry of various nationalities. You’ve got that werewolf face you knew how to put on, teeth bared, eyes bulging; you’re holding the pieces of a chair. And howling.’ ” By including the letter, Miłosz gives readers a glimpse of just how undetached he could be and how long-standing is his hatred of nationalist activism.
Although A Year of the Hunter is a diary and not a novel, its final entries provide a rich and powerful story, which encapsulates much of what Miłosz has to say about human nature, art, religion, and himself. Embracing techniques of flashback narration derived, he freely admits, from film, Miłosz recounts the story of an actress named Stanislawa Uminska, who became famous when she facilitated her husband’s suicide by shooting him in the head. Uminska was tried in Paris and acquitted, and moved back to Henrykow, Poland, to become a nun.
He adds to her story an account of Leon Schiller, who was the chief director of the Polish theater and became deeply involved with the communists after he was ransomed out of Auschwitz. He served communist interests by politicizing the theater. Despite his anticlericalism and his communist sympathies, readers learn that Schiller became a practicing Catholic, likely to have been converted by Uminska, who was also using young prostitutes to act in Schiller’s productions. Miłosz is most fascinated by the hidden and secret religious experience, not out of any psychological voyeurism, but as an example of the complexity of the self and its ability to hide its deepest and truest feelings from the audience of social and historical force. Miłosz believes that the humane religious convictions of mankind run deeper than the political postures of totalitarianism or philosophical fads of nihilism.
These two portraits culminate in the memory of a performance which, readers learn, was the most powerful experience of a drama in Miłosz’s life. Directed by Schiller with one of Uminska’s young prostitutes playing the Mother of God, it was a nativity drama called simply Pastroalka, the farthest thing possible from modern notions of artistic originality. Everything that moved Miłosz so much was in direct contradiction to the modern glorification of art.
The play relied on old Polish Christmas carols, which Miłosz regards as the soul of Polish poetry, but the essence of what Miłosz witnessed was to a large extent extrapoetic, and had to do with the actors themselves. The knowledge that the same girl whose voice moved him to tears as she played the Mother of God was also a prostitute for German soldiers conveyed a mystery about complexity of the human spirit: “I was partaking of a mystery which, simultaneously, revealed the essence of the theater. That essence is, most likely, the human possibility of being someone else, which, if you think about it, means that every man is the home of many personalities that dwell within him potentially, that are never realized, because only one of them appears on the outside and proffers the mask that is accepted by others. A change in a configuration through a change of participants brings forth other hidden and heretofore suppressed personalities. . . . Thus, the theater is, or ought to be, a celebration of human multifacetedness and plasticity which make it possible for every man and woman to bear within himself or herself an entire range of experiences and aptitudes, from the highest virtue to common evil, while being vaguely aware of this and therefore capable of resonating with the actors on the stage.” What Miłosz says about the theater, however strange it might seem to literary critics who concentrate on the aesthetic object, could well apply to the complex tapestry of A Year of the Hunter, which is a muted, but powerful, celebration of the moral complexity and multifacetedness of its author.