Some good news on my just-out book, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life, published by Heyday Books in Berkeley: a smashing review and an interview are just out:
Peter Schlachte writes in Zzyzyva that “the biography makes the strong case that Miłosz’s poetry was irrevocably influenced by his experiences in California, from witnessing the social upheaval at Berkeley in the 1960s to spotting deer on his morning walks around Grizzly Peak.” Well, yes. How could he not be?
The publication of the book marks a curious coincidence: both of us had been in California for forty years. The poet died in 2004, but I continue totting up the years I have spent in California. It now stands at 42.
From the beginning of Schlachte’s review:
Czesław Miłosz: A California Life (256 pages; Heyday) is as much as portrait of a place as it is of a person. Cynthia L. Haven’s biography of the 1980 Nobel winner and towering voice in 20th century literature explores Miłosz’s work not distilled through the lens of his upbringing in Lithuania nor his formative years in Poland, but through his later life, residing on Grizzly Peak in Berkeley and teaching Slavic languages and literatures at UC Berkeley. From the opening pages, Haven writes beautifully of California’s history and landscape. Here she is describing California’s famously balmy weather: “At first, the unrelieved azure sky, the high-noon sun, is oppressive. The newcomer longs for shade, for dusk, for shadow, for stars. But one soon learns to sense the change of seasons not by snow or rain but rather by the difference between the radiant sunlight of summer that gives clarity and sharp relief to everything in its realm, and the lower slant of golden light in autumn, and then our haze-filled days of winter with lingering sunsets that diffuse light and scatter shadows.”
This is emblematic of Haven’s prose throughout the biography—her descriptions, regardless of topic, are not a means to an end. When she writes about California, it’s not merely to draw the connection between the land and Miłosz. Rather, Haven takes space to revel in the “hypnotic monotony” of the weather and the “alien, hyperreal” rocks along Highway 1. Her language is a place of energy, richness, and—fittingly—poetry.
Read the whole thing here.
Also this week, over at the Nob Hill Gazette, Paul Wilner interviews me on “The Americanization of Czesław Miłosz.” An excerpt:
“His formidable wisdom would leave anyone in the dust, but he wore it lightly,” she recalls. “Yet his lifetime of suffering lent him gravity, too. His home life was agonizing, with his first wife, Janina, dying by inches, and a son who went mad. But the suffering kept him searching. He was a restless, relentless learner. He never stopped.’’
Miłosz returned to Poland in 2000, by then an American citizen with a “second, very American wife, Carol,” Haven says. “His Polish friends could see the Americanization — he got more from California than he knew. He must have been haunted by California in his dreams.”
Read the whole thing over at the Nob Hill Gazette here.
Tags: Czesław Miłosz, Paul Wilner, Peter Schlachte