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PARTISAN REVIEW
would seem too big for America to miss, but that by and large we have
missed, and I include in this indictment not just politicians and journalists
but also poets and novelists. I refer to the key role played even now, but
especially just after the war, by Catholic parties like the
Christliche
Demokratisc/ie Uniol/
in Germany, the
Delllorristial/i
in Italy, and the
Gartllistes
in France. Catholics led the way as well, if somewhat later, in the recovery
from fascism in Spain, and of course from communism in Poland. And yet,
for every thousand Americans who have heard of Jean-Paul Sartre or
Simone de Beauvoir, there is barely one who has any sense of the intellec–
tual roots of Europe's Catholic parties in the nineteenth century, barely one
who appreciates the role in the creation of the new Europe of Catholics
like Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Paul Henri Spaak, and Alcide de
Gasperi. Even more exiguous is any American sense of the common intel–
lectual tradi tion, democratic but not Anglo-American, binding together
such different personali ties as Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle.
In
the United States, intellectual leadershi p has been Protestant and
Jewish far more often than Catholic. Although Catholics as a demograph–
ic group carmot complain of discrimination, wri ters fi'om an American
Catholic background have suffered, I believe, £i'om the absence in this
country of any convincingly democratic political alternative with signifi–
cantly Catholic intellectual roots, anything corresponding to these
European movements and leaders. Thus, they have tended to acquiesce in
the tacit American reading of Catholicism as the passive bulwark of gov–
ernment, as latent fascism, or as McCarthyism in remission. And at least a
few Catholic wri ters or prospective wri ters fighting the falsification of self
that the writer's life seems
to
entail in this country, have tied themselves in
secret knots and written less freely than they might have.
I did not read anything by Milosz for years after reading
The Captive
Mind.
I started reading his poetry only when he won the Nobel Prize.
At first, the verses did not seem to link together into as complete and
seamless a whole as the prose of
The Captive Mil/d,
and I wanted that
seamlessness. Little by little, however, I have come to value a poetry
that, as I might put it, does not have everything sewed up. My own
prose, I fear, approaches the ideal of chain mail, never a link unforged
and no part of the subject unprotected.
In
his poetry, Milosz arrives
armed rather as an Athenian warrior of the sort that you might see por–
trayed on a classic vase. There is the pI umed helmet, the embossed
shield, the sword held high and a cloak-but plainly visible beneath
them is the naked man.
Adam Zagajewski :
In
scientific conferences there are two categories of pre–
sentations: the long papers and short reports. Mine will be a short report
