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PARTISAN REVIEW
tease out of it cl ues to the carefully masked private life of the author
though he warns us against this, or, as the blurb on the back cover suggests,
group the entries around the geographical stages of Milosz's personal
odyssey: Wilno, Warszawa, Washington, Paris, Berkeley, and now Krakow.
Today I propose to read
The ABC Book
as its author's latest revisiting of a
hypothetical novel about the twentieth century, which he has been wri t–
ing and rewriting for half a century or more.
In
A Year
if
the Hunter
he gave
us a description of what such a novel should be like:
I would like to read a novel about the twentieth century: not one of
those allegories in which human affairs are depicted metaphorically,
but a novel, a report about many characters and their actions. It would
have to be an international novel, since the century is international,
despite the rise of all sorts of nationalisms. I cannot find such a novel,
so it would be necessary to wri te it-and I am curious as to whether
there is someone, somewhere, who feels capable of creating it. The
currently fashionable narrative techniques-in the first person and
about oneself-are an obstacle. It would have
to
be a panorama employ–
ing representative characters, as in Thomas Mann's
171e Magic MOl/lltaill.
And the heroes should not be ordinary, gray; on the contrary, they
would be modelled on colorful, exceptional personalities. .. .The book
would not be limi ted
to
clashes of views and posi tions, al though the
Naphta-Settembrini quarrel in Tholllas Mann would be reborn in a
new shape....So, a novel of the life of the higher intellectual spheres.
Czeslaw Milosz has created such a novel. He doesn't know he's written it,
but it has been appearing in segments for decades. Milosz's own use of
first-person narration has not been an obstacle to its creation. Far from it.
Its central text is
A Year
if
the Hllllter.
But bits and pieces of it appear else–
where as sketches, variants, and false starts.
The ABC Book
concerns and
refines its vision. Early sketches for it go as far back as
The Captive Milld
(though not
only
there because the same philosophical clash resurfaces
repeatedly in Milosz's writings) where the Naphta-Settembrini quarrel was
indeed reborn. The four Polish wri ters who appear in
The Captive Mind,
driven by their personal demons and seduced by the deadly
logic
of dialec–
tical materialism, are introduced as if they were characters in an historical
drama, each invented to demonstrate the theses expounded in the impas–
sioned theoretical chapters. Alpha, the moralist; Beta, the disappointed
lover; Ganul1a, the slave of history; and Delta, the troubadour: each returns
under his own name in book after book after book as the hypothetical
novel takes shape. The novelist Andrzejewski, the poet and short story
