THE CAPTIVE MIND
57
correspondence in the archives, I too understood. Phillips knew that
Milosz had to support himself by writing and thus could not afford to live
on what we pay (writers still can't). Later on we excerpted parts of
Startillg
Jrom my Europe, Be,Rillllill,(? with
My
Streets,
and
A
Year of the Hunter,
and in
recent years 1988, 1992, and 1996, I met Milosz at some conferences. The
only thing I was disappointed in was that Milosz could not come to what
really was the first conference of dissidents, which we held in Boston in
1981. I found a note in the archives. Of course, ours was a far cry from the
posh Wheatfield junket on the Gettys' private plane to Lisbon five years
later, but Siniavski , Voinovich, Kott, Nekrasov, Baranczak, Kolakowski, and
Aksyonov, among others, did come.
That was when I learned what was going on in the n'linds of people
who had come from there. They still displayed fears of reprisal by the
KGB. They didn't want to get on the same plane from Boston to New
York; they left hotel rooms we paid for unoccupied; and at first they even
wondered at my motives for inviting them. Anyway , I can onJy guess at the
fears and mixed emotions Milosz must have experienced when he decided
to defect so many years earlier. And at the lack of comprehension he found
around him afterwards. Yes, "good little Czeslaw," as he calls himself at that
time, "could not renounce his loyalty." He had left behind more than a
regime-extended family, language, homeland, friends, familiar surround–
ings-he chose to be
dcpayse.
[
guess I'm particularly sympathetic when I
realize that, in spi te of having been sent away from Vienna on a children's
transport, having lost my four grandparents and dozens of other relatives to
the Holocaust, I cannot help feeling inexplicably comfortable when I get
back to Vienna; I remain as attuned to antisenutism as to Strauss valses. I
assume that the multi-lingual Milosz continues to write in Polish, the lan–
guage of his childhood, because he knows (and has said) that some of one's
ilmermost feelings are bound to get lost in translation.
It
may well be that this is why I take to his criticism of the liberal intel–
ligentsia's currently wished for "unified world view," which, as he says, makes
for the disappearance of the distinction "between the enlightened-the
knowledgeable, the progressive, the mentally liberated-and the so-called
masses." For no one truly at home in more than one culture, I believe, can
help but question the certainty with which some of our well-meaning liber–
al thinkers defend the
d/l11/uill,(? down
of our schools, our television, our
newspapers. Actually, it is when you go abroad, and are able to truly under–
stand the customs that underpin people's languages, and their usages, that you
realize why Americans often appear so naive overseas. Milosz mentions that
in passing, when he invokes history.
In
StartingJrol1l
My
Europe,
for instance,
he talks of "the direct pressure of History, with a capital H .. .that may reveal
itself in a detail of archi tecture, in the shaping of a landscape, even in trees like
