Legends 5: The Price of Greatness
Is it really because he could be publicly pilloried for co-operating with PRL intelligence that in the last few years of his life he is so fearful, so often sad and downcast for a man who has achieved such great success at home and abroad?
Apart from Kapuściński, it is hard to name a writer or thinker from Poland (Zygmunt Bauman perhaps? Stanisław Lem?) who can boast that his books are on sale in as many countries, or published in as many languages. Every day the postman brings him letters from all over the world: invitations to give readings, attend conferences, run workshops, or give interviews. He is awarded honorary doctorates and prestigious prizes; he is a juror, commentator and mentor. Often, however, perhaps too often, friends get the impression that he is less pleased about all the honours paid to him by his readers and by the literary experts, and more horrified by ‘those dreadful chaps’: the proponents of lustration and decommunization, who are busy searching through the biographies of public figures for evidence of co-operation with the PRL’s special services.
Words from the beginning of my journey through Rysiek’s life return: despite the world fame that should have made him feel self-confident, there was something oppressing him. I could see it in his eyes, in his step – that smile, that softness.
He expressed his anxiety in a poem written in the final years of his life:
What should I really have done, said no?
I said yes,
And then it began, all this tumbling down and down.
What is there to say?1
As I approach the end of this account, I begin to think he was crushed by fear – and not merely of revelations of his co-operation with the intelligence service. It was about far more than that.
Wiktor Osiatyński suggests the following explanation: ‘Rysiek produced great work. However, in order for this work to come into existence, he also had to create himself, his own image. In the mid-1980s in America I observed at close hand how he learned that a writer has to build his own image to achieve success. He put a great deal of work and effort into it – it was hard for him, especially at the start, but he passed that exam with flying colours.’
‘What sort of image of himself did he create for the world?’ I ask.
‘The image of a fearless war reporter. How far he consciously created it I do not know, but that was the picture that came out of this creative effort.’
‘Also the image of a man who knew in person all the major figures in the most recent history of the countries he wrote about: Che Guevara, Lumumba, Idi Amin?’
‘Yes, he reckoned that without this legend no one would want to listen to and read a reporter, a writer from faraway Poland. Later on he created the image of a thinker. Paradoxically, when he died and could no longer create this image, it went on creating itself spontaneously, carrying Rysiek higher and higher.’
‘He created a legend about himself in which there are a lot of beautiful, impressive and sometimes blood-chilling tales, but quite often, unfortunately, they are “embellished”,’ I say.
‘That is the price he paid for his greatness,’ replies Osiatyński. ‘Usually it was the price of minor inaccuracies, sometimes even confabulations. In time it changed into the price of fear that it would all come out and sully the image he had worked so hard to create.
‘I will sell you for nothing an idea for the title of your book: “Kapuściński – the price of greatness”. If we look at Kapuściński’s life story in this way, then all the confabulations, pacts with the authorities in the PRL era and co-operation with intelligence – subordinating everything, even family life, to success – will sound much milder and, to my mind, fairer.’