THE CAPTIVE MIND
63
Loyalty was necessary during wartime. Andrzejewski wrote about loyalty to
the nation and loyalty to friends in hi s wartime fiction. Of course, where
there's loyalty there's also betrayal. Alpha was bitterly disappointed with Polish
authorities in exile. Then history came to Poland in the shape of the Red
Army and all loyalties were broken. It was not unreasonable to be convinced
that the war demanded dramatic payback in the form of social revolution.
War's devastations warranted a new beginning and radical change. Alpha
embraced that change without the cool distance that characterized Milosz.
In another letter to Merton , Milosz writes that
The Captive Mind
was
both an explosion of long-contained fury and an act of cold vengeance.
These, I believe, were caused by the humiliation Milosz felt due to the dev–
astation the new regime brought on the people-who already had gone
through so much, and who sought only peace and inner harmony. But he
directed hi s anger towards his co ll eagues. "Telling the truth" was meant to
punish them as well. "For Alpha my chapter about him was a blow,"
Milosz wrote. Yet six years later they were friends again. Andrzejewski had
become a poli tical dissident. The end of Stalinism, and perhaps Milosz's
book as well, changed his political attitude. At least this was Milosz's inten–
tion behind the writing of the chapter about Alpha and what he believed
happened. He was angry, but, as he said in another letter to Merton, he
wrote also out of love. " In fact I love those people against whom I direct–
ed my anger much more than I show." He felt responsible for them, for hi s
friends and coll eagues in Poland, and this is why he wrote.
As this gathering shows, Milosz has a gift for friendship. Several of hi s
books, such as
The A
BC
Book}
are acts of friendshi p. The
A
BC
Book
is a mon–
ument to those he survived. His wartime relationship with Alpha was based
on loyalty and on public service but, in the Aristotelian tradition, the highest
kind of friendship is based on truth. In
The Captive Mind}
at the exorbitant
price of exil e,
ill extremis}
he decided to tell the truth, and it turned out to have
been the right decision. He liberated his mind from the captivity of anger and
contempt, and saved his friendship with Alpha. He helped those he
exposed-his colleagues in Poland-because by writing about them he made
their struggles heroic. Truth turned out to be more fruitfi.l1 than loyalty, or
rather, truth became a form of loyalty and the highest form of friendship.
Adam Michnik:
I'm not going
to
torture you in English.
r
will try to do it
in Polish . I am full of uncertainty and humility. It's not easy to talk about
one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, not being a literary
critic, nor about a man who's primarily a poet while discussing a book that
is a philosophical and poli tical text as well as practical theology. For thirty–
five years, since I first read this book, its motto has been with me. It is the
saying of an old Jew from the foothills of the Carpathian mountains: if two
