CZESLAW MILOSZ
477
to make myself aware of the violence of the struggle for existence, the
urban poverty, the loneliness of the individual, the fundamental anti–
intellectualism of the system. I read a great deal, including Louis Adamic,
who had emigrated from his native Lubljana at age thirteen and became
in America a writer of the insulted and the injured, workers of Slavic
origin. Apparently, alone among Poles at the time, I devoted myself to
discriminating reading in English: Henry Miller,
Partisan Review,
and the
least orthodox journal of the New York intellectuals,
Politics,
which
Dwight Macdonald bankrolled with his wife's money. That's also when
I met Dwight. Later in 1955, we took part in a convention organized in
Milan by the Congres pour la Liberte de la Culture. It is he who figures
in my poem "In Milan." "Long into the night we were walking on the
Piazza del Duomo." Mary McCarthy also participated in this conven–
tion. As a result of this reading at least one sector of America became
understandable and close to me: the New York left intellectuals of an
anti-totalitarian bent. I came across the name of Simone Wei I for the
first time in
Politics.
Nicola Chiaromonte's articles in
Partisan Review
spoke right to me, although I didn't know who he was. I was pretty
well oriented in current politics, both internal American and interna–
tional. My dilemma, or ours, I defined in this way: "Which is better: to
be locked in a cage with an intelligent bandit or with a kindhearted im–
becile?" Which testifies to my not very high, and certainly traumatic, as–
sessment of the politics of the co-creators of Yalta....
December 20,
1987.... During the interwar decades there was a period
when the American Communist Party had a peculiar cure for the
"Negro question."
It
proposed that the Southern states, with their ma–
jority black population, should be recognized as Negro states, and that
blacks from the other states should be resettled there. The plan was re–
jected as "un-American"; also, it was too reminiscent of the Indian reser–
vations, of the Trail of Tears when tribes from Georgia and North
Carolina, decimated by hunger, cold, and sickness, made their long trek
to the territories set aside for them in Oklahoma .
But the plan must have pleased Stalin, who liked simple solutions,
smooth and definitive. After all, he transported the entire Volga German
Republic to Siberia. We have to admit that the crime of expulsion is
contained
implicite
in the division of territories according to the
language or race of their inhabitants. Thus, the Poles, expelled by Hitler
from the territories incorporated into the Reich during the Second
World War, forced by him to move to designated streets in their own
cities, were coerced after the war (by fear of deportation) into an
