INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS
SINCE THE THIRTIES
William Phillips:
That many or that few?
537
Czeslaw Milosz:
He wondered why so few. I should say that this
book was for me quite a burden, because I do not consider myself a po–
litical writer, and even here, among the persons in this hall, many know
me as the author of
The Captive Mind,
when for me it was a sideline; ba–
sically I consider myself a poet. For me as a poet that was an obstacle,
because my literary colleagues wouldn't believe that a political author
could write good poems. It was very hard to create for myself a different
persona, while such a book as
The Captive Mind
imprisoned me, as I said,
in a special category.
William Phillips:
Apparently, then, we didn't do you a service when
we published part of it in
Partisan RelJiew
in 1951. It was a disservice.
Question:
C.
Wright Mills, certainly a man of the left, said of your book
that it is one of the great documents of our age. Was that typical of
how American intellectuals reacted to the book?
Czeslaw Milosz:
Some articles written about my book were very fa–
vorable, but they were sociological and political science reviews, and I
was pigeonholed in a very narrow category, which I didn't want. Of
course, the book has a very peculiar story, because it has been constantly
reissued in paperback and has had many readers, but as I said, it is very
awkward to be known as the author of such a book, as an author of
purely political analyses. I repeat what I said, that I wanted to be
It!
yself
and not a political scientist or a sociologist. Fortunately, I say with
irony, when I received tenure at Berkeley, I learned that the responses
there to my book made it an obstacle rather than an asset.
William Phillips:
Joseph Brodsky has just arrived. Would you speak to
us?
Joseph Brodsky: I
don't feel qualified to speak as an observer of that
tremendous vista of writers and intellectuals since the thirties. The only
thing I thought I would speak about is the role of the writers and intel–
lectuals in the foreseeable future or, frankly, even in the present.
All
I've
got to say is that I think if writers and intellectuals have had any role
thus far, it is now being substantially diminished. Society is going to get
more and more atomized. If Marx was right about one thing, it was the
idea that under capitalism human interplay is going to be controlled by
