w. s.
M ERWIN
A man is lying under machin e gun fire on a street in an embattl ed ciry.
He looks at th c pavcment and sees a vcry amusing sight: the cobblestones
are standing upright like th e quills of a porcupine. The bull ets hitting their
edges di splace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man
.ill~'<(,
all poets and philosophers. Let us suppose, too, that a certain poet was
th e hero of th e literary ca fes.. .hi s pocms, recalled in such a moment,
suddenly seem di seased and highbrow. T he vision of th e cobblestones is
unques tionably real, and poetry based on equally
/lalled
experience could
survive triulllphantly that j udgment day of man's illusions.
119
Here was a criterion that in later consideration would seem even plainer.
Confi:onted with such a moment, what poetry would I want to remember?
It was a criterion that immediately seemed indi spensabl e to me. I wanted to
wri te something that oth ers would want to take wi th them at such a time; an
impossibl e standard, perhaps, but it was a reli ef knowing it was there, that it
was what I hoped to do, whether it was possibl e o r not.
I do not remember whether I wrote to Milosz after I read the book or
whether we came to exchange letters about something else, but not long
after that he came to visit me at th e old fa rmhouse in France in the Quercy,
whi ch I had bought with my las t penny when I was twenty- four. I was just
over thirty w hen he came and full o f deep admirati on fo r thi s man who had
los t and seen and articulated so much. That part of the Quercy seemed more
remote, mo re wild , cl oser to the las t century and to the Europe of the
Middl e Ages, the troubadours, the R.oman Empire, and to the time of the
caves and th e aurochs befo re them than it does now, decades later with
autoroutes and conveni ences and to uri sm , though it has survived better than
many places. Czeslaw wanted to see some of that country , and on foot, and
I led him up into the upland where one could walk all day and meet no one,
finding remains and fa rms and settl ements of indeterminate age, recalling
peri ods before Wo rld War I and before the phylloxera and befo re the revo–
lution. There were wild boa r and foxes sometimes and birds, so many birds.
We walked fo r hours and when we got back to the village Czeslaw thanked
me with an evident depth of feeling that took me by surpri se and mumbl ed
something about not having reali zed that any such place still survived and
about it reca lling to him the country he remembered as a child, the place
before
The Captive Mind
and the land, I later supposed, of hi s ances to r, O scar
V.
de
L.
Milosz, ano ther great fi gure to whom Czeslaw introduced me.
Some yea rs later, reading a poem of Czeslaw's entitl ed "With Trumpets
and Zith ers," written in 1965, I fo und thi s line: "An immense night of July
fill ed my mouth with a tas te of rain and / nea r Puybrun by the bridges my
childhood was give n back." Some mi splaced reticence has always withheld
