448
PARTISAN REVIEW
mysterious quality we loosely call genius, one experiences a kind of
intellectual excitement - as though one's own mind is being elevated.
Such is the overwhelming esthetic effect of the biographies of
Eliot and Kafka that I found myself becoming nostalgic for a time
when broad literary questions were central to our concerns. But this
may have more to do with my biography than theirs.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
IN DEFENSE OF THE IMAGINATION
THE LAND OF ULRO. By Czeslaw Mllosz. Translated by Louis
Irlbarne.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $16.95.
Since becoming an emigre in 1951, Milosz the essayist
has written basically two kinds · of books, distinctly different as
regards their implied readers and rhetorical techniques. The first
kind of book, represented by
The Captive Mind, Native Realm,
or the
recent
Witness of Poetry,
is addressed primarily to a Western au–
dience. The chief intent of such. books is to break down certain men–
tal barriers, to open new vistas by revealing the unique perspective
of an outsider-participant, someone who bridges East and West with
his individual experience. As a consequence, the nature of these
books is paradoxical: while they are -like everything Milosz writes
- utterly personal, they also have to be more or less didactic. The
other kind, exemplified (to draw on only those works in English
translation) by
Visions from San Francisco Bay,
seems to be closer to the
traditional genre of "a writer's notebook"; if Milosz has in mind any
specific reader here, it is a reader intimately acquainted with the
author's background, a reader who has shared much of the author's
experience and therefore needs less explanation and instruction.
The Land of Ulro
does its best to belong to this second category.
Its American edition, though it is excellently translated and foot–
noted by Louis Iribarne, begins with a straightforward warning:
"Dear reader," writes Milosz in a specially added Preface, "this book
was not intended for you (... ) When writing it, I indulged in a per–
sonal whim, dismissing in advance the idea of its publication in
English (... ) I gave free rein to my meditations and didn't try to
