AN INVISIBLE ROPE
15
criminal regime." For propagandists in Poland he was a "traitor" and a
"deserter" who had sold himself to power-brokers of various ilk, includ–
ing neo-Nazis; to the "unreconciled" in London, he was now accused of
being a subversive "cryptocommunist" and agent of the regime. At that
time, French intellectuals were intoxicated with leftist ideologies, and for
them Milosz was a "renegade" dishonoring a "progressive system," and
thus someone unclean. This should give us some sense of the strength a
man would need to decide to fight for his own truth. The first gesture to
create the invisible rope, the attempt to liberate himself from the shackles
of an enslaving ideology and to describe its mechanisms, was
The Captive
Mind,
which was translated into countless languages and still serves as a
weapon against ideologies that incorporate moral and mental enslavement.
Mter the enthusiastic reception of the book, Milosz could have set
himself up as the expert in captive minds, specializing in Soviet area studies
and political science, giving lectures at various universi ties, and so on. He
avoided this temptation and devoted himself to, as he put it, "the senseless
task that is writing in Polish while looking out over San Francisco Bay."
Elsewhere, he has compared this to hiding words in tree hollows-without
any assurance that they would one day be found, read, or understood.
From the very beginning of his life in exile, Milosz found support among
the staff of the Parisian monthly
Kuftura.
Jerzy Giedroyc, Jozef Czapski, and
Zofia and Zygmunt Hertz were unswerving supporters even when their views
on certain issues differed. This was the only emigre center on which he could
always count and which did not hesitate in defending him, thereby risking ten–
sion within the remainder of the emigre community. For years
Kultura
alone
published Milosz's poems, essays, and articles, while the first editions of all of
his books were published in
Kultura's
Library Series. The contribution of this
center to the cultural and intellectual life of Poles is impossible to overestimate.
For many years Milosz was regarded as a "non-person," although,
owing to the October thaw of 1956, Jan Blonski and Jerzy Kwiatkowski
did manage to publish a few critical studies of Milosz's work. But the work
itself was still unavailable. Silence surrounded his work and was scrupu–
lously maintained until Milosz received the Nobel Prize in 1980. However,
single copies of Milosz's books, published in Paris, made it through cen–
sors and customs, were retyped in parts or in their entirety, sometimes even
hand-copied, and then passed on from hand to hand-often at great per–
sonal risk. Of course, the circulation was relatively small.
[n the mid-seventies, the democratic opposition and the underground
press were born. An avalanche of leaflets, newspapers, pamphlets, informa–
tional bulletins, serious political and socio-cultural and literary journals,
and books-by Polish as well as foreign authors-began to appear. At first
these works were copied on a typewriter; then on simple printing
