56
PARTISAN REVIEW
who were not monolithic in their thinking. Perhaps as a poet as
well as a political person, he was flexible and was aware of the
dimensions of doubt and of all the intellectual modulations in the
area where
Ii
terary and poli tical questions cross.
By then, Milosz had been living in America (fr0111
1946
to
1950),
and this
was Phillips's first extended stay in Paris. Milosz was tormented: to return
to a Poland that was crushed or defect to an America where he mostly
found people whose minds were "unreal." Phillips, on the other hand, was
stunned by the French intellectuals he encountered "at the underground
bar of the Hotel Royale, which was where they met while the touris,ts were
looking for [Sartre] at the Flore or the Deux Magots." Although
Partisan
Review
had introduced new French thinking to America immediately after
the war, by
1949
French intellectuals had not
only
become anti-American,
but ideological to the point of refusing to admit the totalitarian nature of
the Soviet Union and its dangerous aims. Both Milosz and Phillips-joined
by no more than a handful of people, among them Camus, Koestler,
Sperber, and Aron-though critical of the corruption that is inherent
almost inevitably in capitalism and consumerism, were not blind to what
Stalinism entailed. Milosz, of course, knew it first-hand. He recalls:
[ read a great deal, including Louis Adamic, who had emigrated fi-om
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, [ devoted myself to discriminating reading in
English: Henry Miller,
Partisan Relliell
l ,
and the least orthodox journal
of the New York intellectuals,
PoliTics,
which Dwight Macdonald
bankrolled with his wife's money. That's also when [ met Dwight.
Milosz's subsequent meetings with Dwight, Mary McCarthy, and Nicola
Chiaromonte (who reviewed
The CaptirJe Milld
for us), helped make "at
least one sector of America understandable and close to Ihim]: the New
York intellectuals of an anti-totali tarian bent."
I
don't think Milosz then
could have realized how upset these intellectuals would be for the next few
years, caught between the wild reactionary anti-Communism of McCarthy
and the fellow travelers and liberals, most of whom were naive in their
hopes for peace and refused to recognize the realities of the Cold War.
While looking through the index of
Partisall RevierIJ,
I
could not help
but note that Milosz, in spite of what
I
might call this "elective affinity,"
did not write for us after his arrival in the United States. Upon finding the
