| About the book
Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
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8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
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Czesław MiłoszA Literary Larder
About the book
Against doom and gloom
After forty years of wandering about various foreign countries I went back to Poland well immunised. Now any sort of doom and gloom in the way a person judged their own country irritated, or even angered me, because it meant following the line of least resistance.
The point is that an aversion to reality had become the rule in modern writing; it had nothing to do with one or another evaluation of Poland, but the general tone in today’s literary world, an unmistakable symptom of inferiority and banality. I wanted nothing to do with it, because I didn’t want to lower myself to what was by now general procedure, but which for some unknown reason was regarded as a basic requirement. If only there were just a tiny dash of optimism in people’s fundamental attitude to the world! But no something had cracked somewhere in the very foundations of their world outlook. And no one was taking any notice everyone just went about as if quite unaware that their responses had been poisoned somewhere at the very source. The only choice was doom and gloom: irony, sarcasm and captious derision.
So where did it first incubate? Probably in French twentieth-century fiction. On reading the Portuguese writer, José Saramago, I immediately recognised that he is of the same school, and that was enough for me to drop him. So perhaps presenting Poland as a hopeless country is not actually a way of describing any sort of reality, but just a stylistic deviation, the mannerism of a fashionable school of writing. This mannerism has not been adopted by children’s literature, hence the success of J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien.
Aware of this literary inertia, could I have given in to it? Inclined towards a gloomy view of things, I had to feign optimism purely in order to keep myself clean. Old now, I was being misleading by assuming the features of youth. I was counted among the optimists, although I wasn’t one. That’s what I was brought to by my own self-discipline, which regarded yielding to one’s own negativity as immodest or dishonourable. I remember the term “miserable-ism” being applied to the fruits of despondency in pre-war France, and that put me on my guard. In other words I was protected by the experience of changes in style, not self-restraint in how I judged reality, even if it didn’t present a rosy picture.
So you won’t be hearing any gloomy prophecies from me, the former catastrophist. And what was I to do, if that’s what I was like, after so much initiation into the evil of human societies and regimes?
That means, if you ask me what I think about the international situation, what I think about the situation in Poland I have nothing to say, because I’m completely walled in and wouldn’t know how to bring myself to make any judgement at all. Feeling repugnance has gradually been taking over in world literature, and I’ve been exposed to it, I’ve got used to it, though I find it utterly tedious and refuse to take part in it.
When I read the statements, most often of young people, they seem to me thoughtless, hysterical even, and I can see the same features of thoughtlessness or hysteria in my old texts. Hence I conclude that as an old man I’m not suited to voicing opinions about today’s world, because I have an optimistic bent, and I’d enjoy the works of writers like Kipling, describing what he got up to in his school days, for example. I realise that I’m putting myself out of fashion in this way, outside general tastes and maybe outside the style of the era.
It’s a funny affliction, instead of being a typical old malcontent, but by making this sort of declaration now, I’m leaving myself at least a field of manoeuvre, because there’s humour hiding under the surface of my confessions too, in other words I’m giving myself permission to play on the day of the funeral.
My secretary, Agnieszka Kosińska, to whom I dictated this text (I’ll take this opportunity to admit that my eyes have become too weak for me to write my own texts, and since Miłosz’s Alphabet I have only been able to dictate), was surprised I’d got something like that into my head, so I must add that while cutting oneself off from reality has certain advantages, it has some drawbacks too, because it puts us at risk of adopting the Buddha’s enigmatic smile.
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
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There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
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