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shaken; he lost all his friends ; and his posthumously publlshed letters tes–
tifY to the depths of his despair. He was firmly convinced that no one
understood the essence of Communism and the danger it poses to hu–
manity, and that he, by deciding after a lengthy inner struggle to make a
public statement, had lost. Obviously, he had once been fascinated by the
Historical Necessity of the Triumph of the Soviet Union . The circles
that condemned Chambers consisted by no means exclusively of Marxists
and their sympathizers of various stripes; they also included broad circles
of liberal opinion united in their enmity toward anti-Communism.
"What would have happened if .. " is always a risky business, but I think
that had I stayed in America I could not have written
The Captille Milld
without exposing myself to ostracism by the only circles I could rely on
in this country.
It
was even worse in France, but I had anticipated my
foreignness ahead of time, as it were; I would be a leper, I assumed, for–
ever.
In 1954 or 1955, in the lobby of a Paris theater where a Polish play
was being performed, I bumped into Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, who turned
and snapped, "I cannot greet you, darling." I was told that Iwaszkiewicz
had discussed
The Captille Milld
with Sartre at some meeting in Berlin.
Sartre: "It's not enough to be smart, you also have to have
sagesse."
Sagesse
implies both wisdom and caution. Naturally, I was not cautious.
That book trailed after me for a long time . It elicited denunciations by
Poles to the American Embassy in Paris (for being crypto-Communist),
which meant it wrecked my chances for a visa to America for nine years;
it earned me the "mark of a traitor" among progressives; and also,
something I didn't at all like, it meant I was considered a prose writer, a
scholar in the field of
political science. Nota bene:
it did not help me ob–
tain a position as professor of literature; on the contrary.
A second inescapable condition was my pitiable frame of mind. I
think a lot about ideology now, about the almost limitless capacity of
people to get themselves pulled into a downward spiral from which
there is no escape. The "Hegelian bite" can simply be explained by a
traumatic experience of weakness - one's own weakness or that of one's
country - in relation to a force that is advancing like an iron roller.
"Europe is ours." After all, in the years 1945-1950 no one believed in a
self-sufficient capitalist Europe. I wrote to extricate myself from that
downward spiral. Although only another act of self-therapy, my novel
The Issa Valley
rescued me from abstractions and gave me back to poetry.
December 30,
1987. All people are physically constituted the same way,
and thus they can understand each other in their elemental feelings. The
