ANOTHER BEAUTY, a wise, iridescent book by the Polish writer
Adam Zagajewski, dips in and out of many genres: coming-of-age memoir, commonplace book, aphoristic musings, vignettes, and defense of poetry—that is, a defense of the idea of literary greatness.
It is, to be sure, something of a misnomer to call Zagajewski a writer: a poet who also writes indispensable prose does not thereby forfeit the better title. Prose being the wordy affair it is, Zagajewski’s fills a good many more pages than his poems. But in literature’s canonical two-party system, poetry always trumps prose. Poetry stands for literature at its most serious, most improving, most intense, most coveted. “The author and reader always dream of a great poem, of writing it, reading it, living it.” Living the poem: being elevated by it; deepened; for a moment, saved.
From a great Polish writer we expect Slavic intensities. (The particular Polish nuance may require a little application.) Literature as soul nourishment has been a Slavic specialty for the last century and a half. It seems hardly surprising that Zagajewski, for all the calm and delicacy of his poet-voice, would hold a view of poetry more akin to that of Shelley than of Ashbery. As it happens, the reality of self-transcendence has even less credibility among younger Polish poets than among those writing in English. And Zagajewski’s transposed religious longings—to live, through poetry, on a “higher plane”—are never voiced without a
grace note of mild self-deprecation. A recent collection of poems is called, with charming sobriety, Mysticism for Beginners. The world (of lyrical feeling, of ecstatic inwardness) to which poetry gives poets and their readers access is one that defective human nature bars us from inhabiting except fleetingly. Poems “don’t last,” Zagajewski observes wryly, “particularly the short lyric poems that prevail today.” All they can offer is “a moment of intense experience.” Prose is sturdier, if only because it takes longer to get through.
Another Beauty is Zagajewski’s third book of prose to appear in English. The first two are made up of pieces, some essayistic, some memoiristic, with titles. The new book is a flow of untitled (and unnumbered) short and not so short takes. Its mix of narratives, observations, portraits, reflections, reminiscences gives Another Beauty a high-velocity variance of mood and attack that we associate more with a volume of poems—lyric poems, anyway—which is a succession of discontinuous intensities, at different pitches of concern.
What kind of intensities? (That is, what kind of prose?) Thoughtful, precise; rhapsodic; rueful; courteous; prone to wonder. Then and now, here and there—the whole book oscillates, vibrates, with contrasts. (This is like this, but that is like that. Or: we expected this, but we got that.) And everything reeks of dissimilarity, savor, message, metaphor. Even the weather:
The meteorological depressions of Paris have an oceanic feel; the Atlantic dispatches them in the direction of the continent. The winds blow, dark clouds scurry across the city like racecars. The rain falls at a spiteful slant. At times the heavens’ face appears, a scrap of blue. Then it’s dark again, the Seine becomes a black pavement. The lowlands of Paris seethe with oceanic energy, thunderbolts pop like champagne corks. Whereas a typical Central European depression—centered somewhere above the Carpathians—behaves completely differently: it’s subdued and melancholy, one might say philosophical. The clouds barely move. They’re shaped differently; they’re like an enormous blimp drooping over Kraków’s Central Market. The light shifts gradually; the violet glow fades, giving way to yellow spotlights. The sun skulks somewhere behind silken clouds, illuminating the most varied
strata of earth and sky. Some of the clouds resemble deep-sea fishes that have ascended to the surface and swim with mouths wide open, as if startled by the taste of air. This kind of weather can last for several days, the meek climate of Central Europe. And if, after lengthy deliberations, a thunderstorm does strike, it behaves as if it were stuttering. Instead of a sharp, decisive shot, it emits a series of drawn-out sounds, pa pa pa pa—an echo instead of a blast. Thunder on the installment plan.
In Zagajewski’s rendering, nature turns out to be wittily steeped in the bathos of national histories, with the crisp, bullying weather of Paris flaunting France’s indefatigable good fortune and Kraków’s tired, melancholy weather summing up Poland’s innumerable defeats and other woes. The poet can’t escape history, only transmute it sometimes, for purposes of bravura descriptiveness, into magic geography.
MAY YOU BE BORN in interesting times, runs the ancient (or at least proverbial) Chinese curse. Updated for our own hyperinteresting era, it might run: May you be born in an interesting place.
What Czeslaw Milosz calls, mordantly, “the privilege of coming from strange lands where it is difficult to escape history”—think of Poland, Ireland, Israel, Bosnia—prods and pinches, exalts and exhausts a writer like Zagajewski whose standards are set by world literature. History means strife. History means tragic impasse—and your friends being jailed or killed. History means perennial challenges to the nation’s very right to exist. Poland, of course, had two centuries of history’s chokehold—from the First Partition in 1772, which in a few years brought about the end of an autonomous state (not restored until after World War I), to the collapse of the Soviet-style regime in 1989.
Such countries—such histories—make it hard for their writers ever completely to secede from the collective anguish. Here is the testimony of another great writer living in a newer nation condemned to nonstop dread, A. B. Yehoshua:
You are insistently summoned to solidarity, summoned from within yourself rather than by an external compulsion, because you live from
one newscast to the next, and it becomes a solidarity that is technical, automatic from the standpoint of its emotional reaction, because by now you are completely built to react that way and live in tension. Your emotional reactions to any piece of news about an Israeli casualty, a plane shot down, are predetermined. Hence the lack of solitude, the inability to be alone in the spiritual sense and to arrive at a life of intellectual creativity.
Yehoshua’s terms are identical with those of Zagajewski, whose first prose book in English is a collection of six pieces published in the early 1980s called Solidarity, Solitude. Solitude erodes solidarity; solidarity corrupts solitude.
The solitude of a Polish writer is always inflected by a sense of the community formed by the literature itself. Milosz, in his own great defense of poetry, the address that he delivered at the Jagiellonian University in 1989 entitled “With Polish Poetry Against the World,” pays homage to Polish poetry for having protected him “from sterile despair in emigration,” recalling that “in solitude too difficult and painful to recommend to anyone” there was always “the sense of duty toward my predecessors and successors.” For Milosz, born in 1911, a Polish writer may never escape being responsible to others. By this rule, the stellar counterexample of Witold Gombrowicz—in his fiction, in his legendarily egocentric, truculent Diary, in his brazen polemic “Against Poetry”—offers evidence, convulsive evidence, of the authority of idealism in Polish literature. History is present even by its absence, Milosz observes in a late book of prose, Milosz’s ABC’s; and the cult of altruism and high-mindedness flourishes, if perversely, in Gombrowicz’s denial of responsibility to anything beyond the self’s anarchic clamor, his ingenious harangues on behalf of the menial, the immature, the low-minded.
Squeezed right, every life can be construed as embodying exemplary experiences and historical momentousness. Even Gombrowicz could not help but see his life as exemplary, making something didactic—a rebuke to his origins—out of his gentry childhood, his precocious literary notoriety, his fateful, irrevocable emigration. And a writer whose love of literature still entailed, unresentfully, so much piety toward
old masters, such eagerness to feed on the magnificent traditions on offer from the past, could hardly help seeing his life—at least his early circumstances—as some kind of representative destiny.
Soon after Zagajewski’s birth in October 1945 in the medieval Polish city of Lwów, his family was uprooted in the great displacements (and redrawings of maps) that followed the Yalta agreements of the Three Old Men, which put Lwów in the hands of the Soviet Union; and the poet grew up in the formerly German, now Polish, town of Gliwice, thirty miles from Auschwitz. In Two Cities, his second prose book translated into English, Zagajewski writes:
I spent my childhood in an ugly industrial city; I was brought there when I was barely four months old, and then for many years afterward
I was told about the extraordinarily beautiful city that my family had to leave.
The family mythology of an expulsion from paradise may have made him feel, he says, forever homeless. It also seems, on the evidence of his writing, to have made him an expert lover of cities—“beautiful, bewitching Kraków” above all, for which he left unredeemable Gliwice to attend university, and where he remained until he was thirty-seven.
Dates are sparse in Another Beauty, and the arrangement of stories-from-a-life is unchronological. But there is, implicitly, always a where, with which the poet’s heart and senses are in dialogue. Not the traveler, not even the émigré—most of the great Polish poets have gone westward, and Zagajewski is not one of the exceptions—but the continually stimulated city dweller is featured here. There are few living rooms and no bedrooms in Another Beauty, but more than a few public squares and libraries and trains. Once he’s past his student years, the occasional “we” disappears; there is only an “I.” Occasionally he will mention where he is writing: Zagajewski now lives in Paris and teaches one term each year at the University of Houston. “I’m strolling through Paris,” one entry begins. “And at this very moment I’m listening to the Seventh Symphony in Houston,” notes another. There are always two cities: Lwów and Gliwice, Gliwice and Kraków, Paris and Houston.
More poignant oppositions infuse this book: self and others, youth
and age. There are plangent evocations of difficult elderly relatives and cranky professors: this portrait of the poet as a young man is striking for its tenderness toward the old. And the account of the decorous ardors, literary and political, of his student years sets his book quite at odds with the narcissistic purposes, and pointedly indiscreet contents, of most autobiographical writing today For Zagajewski, autobiography is an occasion to purge oneself of vanity, while advancing the project of self-understanding—call it the wisdom project—which is never completed, however long the life.
To describe oneself as young is to face that one is no longer young. And a pithy acknowledgment that the debilities of age approach, with death in their train, is one of the many observations that cut short a story from Zagajewski’s past. Telling the stories discontinuously, as glimpses, secures several good results. It keeps the prose dense, quick. And it invites telling only those stories that lead to some insight, or epiphany. There is a larger lesson in the very way of telling, a lesson in moral tone: how to talk about oneself without complacency. Life, when not a school for heartlessness, is an education in sympathy. The sum of the stories reminds us that in a life of a certain length and spiritual seriousness, change—sometimes not for the worse—is just as real as death.
ALL WRITING IS a species of remembering. If there is anything triumphalist about Another Beauty it is that the acts of remembering the book contains seem so frictionless. Imagining—that is, bringing the past to mental life—is there as needed; it never falters; it is by definition a success. The recovery of memory, of course, is an ethical obligation: the obligation to persist in the effort to apprehend the truth. This seems less apparent in America, where the work of memory has been exuberantly identified with the creation of useful or therapeutic fictions, than in Zagajewski’s lacerated corner of the world.
To recover a memory—to secure a truth—is a supreme touchstone of value in Another Beauty. “I didn’t witness the extermination of the Jews,” Zagajewski writes:
I was born too late. I bore witness, though, to the gradual process by which Europe recovered its memory. This memory moved slowly, more like a lazy, lowland river than a mountain stream, but it finally, unambiguously condemned the evil of the Holocaust and the Nazis, and the evil of Soviet civilization as well (though in this it was less successful, as if reluctant to admit that two such monstrosities might simultaneously coexist).
That memories are recovered—that is, that the suppressed truths do reemerge—is the basis of whatever hope one can have for justice and a modicum of sanity in the ongoing life of communities.
Once recovered, though, even truth may become complacent and self-flattering. Thus, rather than provide yet one more denunciation of the iniquities and oppressiveness of the regime that was shut down in 1989, Zagajewski chooses to stress the benefits of the struggle against evil that flowed to the idealistic young in his portrayal of the flawed beginnings of his vocation, as a “political poet,” and his activities in dissident student and literary circles in the Kraków of the late 1960s and 1970s. (In 1968, Zagajewski was twenty-three years old.) In those heady days, poetry and activism rhymed. Both elevated, heightened; engagement in a just cause, like service to poetry, made you feel larger.
That every generation fears, misunderstands, and condescends to its successor—this, too, is a function of the equivalence of history and memory (history being what it is agreed on, collectively, to remember). Each generation has its distinctive memories, and the elapsing of time, which brings with it a steady accumulation of loss, confers on those memories a normativeness which cannot possibly be honored by the young, who are busy compiling their memories, their benchmarks. One of Zagajewski’s most moving portraits of elders is of Stefan Szuman, an illustrious member of the interwar Polish intelligentsia (he had known Stanislaw Witkiewicz and Bruno Schulz) and now a retired professor at the university living in isolation and penury. Its point is Zagajewski’s realization, thinking back, that he and his literary friends could only have seemed like fools and savages, “shaped by a postwar education, by new schools, new papers, new radio, new TV,” to the defeated,
homely, embittered Szuman and his wife. The rule seems to be: each generation looks upon its successor generation as barbarians.
Zagajewski, himself no longer young and now a teacher of American students, is committed to not replicating, in his turn, that kind of despair and incomprehension. Nor is he content to write off an entire older Polish generation of intellectuals and artists, his generation’s “enemy”—the true believers and those who just sold out—for turpitude and cowardice: they weren’t simply devils, any more than he and his friends were angels. As for those “who began by serving Stalin’s civilization” but then changed, Zagajewski writes: “I don’t condemn them for their early, youthful intoxication. I’m more inclined to marvel at the generosity of human nature, which offers gifted young people a second chance, the opportunity for a moral comeback.”
At the heart of this assessment is the wisdom of the novelist, a professional of empathy, rather than that of a lyric poet. (Zagajewski has written four novels, none as yet translated into English.) The dramatic monologue “Betrayal” in Two Cities begins:
Why did I do that? Why did I do what? Why was I who I was? And who was I? I am already beginning to regret that I agreed to grant you this interview. For years I refused; you must have asked me at a weak moment or in a moment of anxiety … What did that world look like? The one you were too late to get to know. The same as this one. Completely different.
That everything is always different … and the same: a poet’s wisdom. Actually, wisdom tout court.
Of course, history should never be thought of with a capital H. The governing sense of Zagajewski’s memory-work is his awareness of having lived through several historical periods, in the course of which things eventually got better. Modestly, imperfectly—not utopianly—better. The young Zagajewski and his comrades in dissidence had assumed that communism would last another hundred, two hundred years, when, in fact, it had less than two decades to go. Lesson: evil is not immutable. The reality is, everyone outlives an old self, often more than one, in the course of a reasonably long life.
Another Beauty is, in part, a meditation on easing the clamp of history: liberating the self from “the grimaces and caprices” of history. That should not be so hard in the less flagrantly evil public world that has come into being in Poland since 1989. But institutions may be more easily liquidated than a temperament. Zagajewski’s temperament (that is, the dialogue he conducts with himself) is rooted in an era when heroism was at least an option, and ethical rigor still something admired and consecrated by the genius of several national literatures. How to negotiate a soft landing onto the new lowland of diminished moral expectations and shabby artistic standards is the problem of all the Central European writers whose tenacities were forged in the bad old days.
The maturing that Zagajewski chronicles can be described as the relaxing of this temperament: the finding of the right openness, the right calmness, the right inwardness. (He says he can only write when he feels happy, peaceful.) Exaltation—and who can gainsay this judgment from a member of the generation of ’68?—is viewed with a skeptical eye. Hyperemphatic intensity holds no allure. His end of the religious spectrum does not include any notion of the sacred, which figures centrally in the work of the late Jerzy Grotowski and the theatre center in Gardzienice led by Wlodzimierz Staniewski. While the sacralecstatic tradition is still alive in Polish theatre—but then theatre, especially this kind of theatre, is compulsorily collective—it has no place in contemporary Polish literature. Another Beauty is suffused with the humility of a spiritual longing that precludes frenzy, and envisages no large gestures of sacrifice. As Zagajewski notes: “The week isn’t made up only of Sundays.”
Some of his keenest pages are descriptions of happiness, the everyday happiness of a connoisseur of solitary delights: strolling, reading, listening to Beethoven or Schumann. The “I” of Another Beauty is scrupulous, vulnerable, earnest—without a jot of self-protective irony. And neither Zagajewski nor this reader would wish it otherwise. Irony would come at the cost of so much pleasure. “Ecstasy and irony rarely meet in the world of art,” Zagajewski observes. “When they do it’s usually for the purposes of mutual sabotage; they struggle to diminish each other’s power.” And he is unabashedly on the side of ecstasy.
These descriptions are tributes to what produces happiness, not celebrations of the receptive self. He may simply describe something he loves, or quote a favorite poem: the book is a sampling of appreciations and sympathies. There are penetrating sketches of admired friends such as Adam Michnik, a beacon of resistance to the dictatorship (who while in jail wrote about the poet Zbigniew Herbert, among others, in a book he titled From the History of Honor in Poland); there is a reverential salute to the ancient doyen of Polish émigrés in Paris, the painter, writer, and heroic alumnus of Soviet prison camps Józef Czapski. L’enfer, c’est les autres. No, it is others who save us, Zagajewski declares in the poem that gives the book its title and serves as its epigraph.
Here is “Another Beauty” in the new version by the book’s translator, Clare Cavanagh:
We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
This is why I pause: which word
to use, you or he. Each he
betrays some you, but
calm conversation bides its time
in others’ poems.
And here it is as it appeared in 1985 in Tremor: Selected Poems, Zagajewski’s first collection of poems in English, translated by Renata Gorczynski, where it is entitled “In the Beauty Created by Others”:
Only in the beauty created
by others is there consolation,
in the music of others and in others’ poems.
Only others save us,
even though solitude tastes like
opium. The others are not hell,
if you see them early, with their
foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams.
That is why I wonder what
word should be used, “he” or “you.” Every “he”
is a betrayal of a certain “you” but
in return someone else’s poem
offers the fidelity of a sober dialogue.
A defense of poetry and a defense of goodness, or, more exactly, of good-naturedness.
Nothing could take the reader in a more contrary direction to today’s cult of the excitements of self than to follow Zagajewski as he unspools his seductive praise of serenity, sympathy, forbearance; of “the calm and courage of an ordinary life.” To declare “I believe in truth!” and, in another passage, “Goodness does exist!” (those exclamation points!) seems, if not Panglossian—one American reviewer detected a touch of Panglossian uplift in the book—then at least quixotic. This culture offers few current models of masculine sweetness, and those we already possess, from past literature, are associated with naïveté, childlikeness, social innocence: Joe Gargery in Great Expectations, Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. Zagajewski’s persona in Another Beauty is anything but innocent in that sense. But he has a special gift for conjuring up states of complex innocence, the innocence of genius, as in his heartrending portrait-poem “Franz Schubert: A Press Conference.”
THE TITLE MAY MISLEAD. Another Beauty makes clear at every turn that, worshipper of greatness in poetry and other arts that he is, Zagajewski is not an aesthete. Poetry is to be judged by standards still higher: “Woe to the writer who values beauty over truth.” Poetry must
be protected from the temptations to arrogance inherent in its own states of elation.
Of course, both beauty and truth seem like frail guideposts left over from a more innocent past. In the delicate negotiation with the present which Zagajewski conducts on behalf of the endangered verities, nostalgia would count as a deficit of argument. Still, even absent the old certainties and license to perorate, he is pledged to defending the idea of “sublime” or “noble” achievement in literature—assuming, as he does, that we still need the qualities in art that are praised by such now virtually unsayable words. Zagajewski’s most eloquent, summative defense is “The Shabby and the Sublime,” an address he delivered at a Dutch university in 1998 which posed the pseudo-naïve question: Is literary greatness still possible?
The belief in literary greatness implies that the capacity for admiration is still intact. When admiration is corrupted, that is, made cynical, the question as to whether greatness is possible simply vanishes. Nihilism and admiration compete with each other, sabotage each other, struggle to diminish each other’s power. (Like irony and ecstasy.)
Disheartened though he is by “the mutation downward of European literature,” Zagajewski declines to speculate about what has given the advantage to subjectivism and the revolt against “greatness.” Perhaps those brought up on the fierceness of state-administered mediocrity find it hard to be as indignant as they might be about the extent to which mercantilist values (often sporting the mask of “democratic” or populist values) have sapped the foundations of the sublime. “Soviet civilization,” a.k.a. communism, was a great conservative force. The cultural policies of communist regimes embalmed the old, hierarchical notions of achievement, seeking to confer a noble pedigree on propagandistic banalities. In contrast, capitalism has a truly radical relation to culture, dismantling the very notion of greatness in the arts, which is now most successfully dismissed by the ecumenical philistinism of both cultural progressives and cultural reactionaries as an “elitist” presumption.
Zagajewski’s protest against the collapse of standards has nothing
analytical about it. Yet surely he understands the futility (and indignity) of simply denouncing the collapse. Orphaned pieties overheat sometimes: “Without poetry, we’d hardly be better than the mammals.” And many passages assert a familiar dismay, especially when he succumbs to the temptation to see our era as uniquely degraded. What, he inquires rhetorically, would “the great, innocent artists of the past, Giotto or van Eyck, Proust or Apollinaire, have done if some spiteful demon had set them down in our flawed and tawdry world”? Don’t know about Giotto or van Eyck; but Proust (d. 1922) and Apollinaire (d. 1918) innocent? I should have thought the Europe in which that colossal, senseless slaughter called World War I took place was, if anything, a good deal worse than “flawed and tawdry.”
The idea of art as the beleaguered vehicle of spiritual value in a secular age should not have been left unexamined. Nevertheless, Zagajewski’s utter absence of rancor and vindictiveness, his generosity of spirit, his awareness of the vulgarity of unremitting complaint and of the self-righteous assumption of one’s own cultural superiority, mark off his stance from that of the usual professional mourners of the Death of High Culture, such as the ever portentous George Steiner. (Once in a while he slips into facile assertions of the superiority of the past over the present, but even then he is never grandiose or self-aggrandizing: call it Steinerism with a human face.)
Inveterately prescriptive, occasionally sententious, Zagajewski is too shrewd, too respectful of common or ordinary wisdom, not to see the limits of each of the positions that surround and make sense out of his abiding passions. One can be elevated, deepened, improved by works of art. But, Zagajewski cautions, the imagination can become one of its own enemies “if it loses sight of the solid world that cannot be dissolved in art.”
Because the book is notational, juxtapositional, it is possible for Zagajewski to entertain quite contradictory assessments. What is valuable is how divided Zagajewski is, as he himself acknowledges. The reflections and the stories in Another Beauty show us a subtle, important mind divided between the public world and the claims of art, between solidarity and solitude; between the original “two cities”: the Human
City and the City of God. Divided, but not overthrown. There is anguish, but then serenity keeps breaking through. There is desolation and, as well, so many fortifying pleasures supplied by the genius of others. There was scorn, until caritas chimed in. There is despair, but there is, just as inexorably, consolation.
[2001]