“Czesław Miłosz: A California Life” – in London! Plus: Miłosz’s odd interview with Wallace Stegner.
Friday, April 22nd, 2022
The eminent Poetry London has featured Czesław Miłosz: A California Life for its spring issue – and we couldn’t be more pleased that England is taking notice of the Nobel poet’s American life. The issue includes a long selection from the book, which was published by Heyday Books in Berkeley. In the selection, the Lithuanian-born poet talks about the American wilderness and the “prickliness” of California. Where to get your copy? Try here.
The journal’s Poetry Editor, André Naffis-Sahely, contacted me last winter to make all this happen, and he also recorded a podcast with me. Stay tuned for its appearance on the Poetry London website; it will also be online as an Apple Podcast. (We’ll link it on this post, too.)
Meanwhile, let us excerpt Poetry London’s excerpt, from the chapter in my book called, “I Did Not Choose California. It Was Given to Me”:
In 1985, Czesław Miłosz spent an awkward afternoon on a hilltop with the novelist Wallace Stegner, one of California’s most prominent conservation writers.
The occasion was a Public Broadcasting Service filming. The setting, Tilden Regional Park, is a mile or two down winding Grizzly Peak Boulevard from Miłosz’s home. Both of the eminent writers look slightly ill at ease conversing alone on the parched yellow grass, with conifers and hills in the background. Stegner is doing most of the talking, and he attempts to draw Miłosz out, but the poet’s replies are brief and tend to extinguish the line of thought rather than extend it. (“When Miłosz didn’t want to talk, you sure as hell felt it,” translator Clare Cavanagh once commented to me.)
“I lived through rebellion against California landscape,” Miłosz confesses on camera, in an accent still redolent of his European roots. It was a rebellion, he continued, that lasted twenty years.
Stegner affably agrees that California “offends a lot of people by being so dry and barren and prickly. Everything in it has barbs.”
Miłosz then recounts to Stegner his long history with natura: “When I was, I guess, twelve, I had an obsession of wilderness. I wanted to change everything into untouched wilderness. I was drawing maps of imaginary countries covered by forest, and the only means of transportation would be canoes. Yes, I had my dream of virgin land.” This was his America, and those images overrode all the crass TV shows and garish billboards he saw every day. His America was the America he’d read about as a child in the pages of James Fenimore Cooper. As he wrote:
America is for me the illustrated version
Of childhood tales about the heart of tanglewood …
He described himself, in third person, as “obviously in love with American Nature, which he duly romanticizes, as he did in his childhood when he read books for young people about travels in America.” (Watch the whole 33-minute film here.)
During his early adventures on the East Coast, he developed an extensive vocabulary of plants, animals, and birds, but they were sojourns, not an exile, and so the nearness of species and varieties, their similarities, were fascinating, not poignant reminders of a lost land. California and exile had made the relationship to natura more conflicted, highlighting the overwhelming abundance, and also the similar-but-dissimilar aspects, of everything he saw: “I had known only one sort of pine, a pine tree was a pine tree, but here suddenly there was the sugar pine, the ponderosa pine, the Monterey pine, and so on—seventeen species, all told. Five species of spruce, six of fir . . . . Several species each of cedar, larch, juniper. The oak, which I had believed to be simply an oak, always and everywhere eternal and indivisible in its oakness, had in America multiplied into something like sixteen species, ranging from those whose oakness was beyond question to others where it was so hazy that it was hard to tell right off whether they were laurels or oaks.”
