CZESLAW MILOSZ
From
Mi losz's ABC's
A
NONYMOUS LETTERS.
"People don't like you, Mr. Milosz."
The anonymous author appended these words when he sent me
a copy of a rather disgusting article about me from the Polish
emigre press. And it was true, because with the exception of a small
group of people, I was never liked. There is no reason for us to be too
certain that we are right. My enemies, who often wrote anonymous let–
ters or shot arrows at me from under cover, believed that they were
right. First, my various flaws made it difficult
to
raise me onto a
pedestal despite the obvious social need. Second, my innate blood–
thirstiness often erupted in contemptuous remarks about individuals,
which I now consider
to
be simple rudeness. Third, from the beginning
of my career accusations of arrogance were raised by people I had
offended and by those I had rejected, whose presence was a moral prob–
lem for me. Let us consider what a huge number of people enter the fray
through writing, painting, sculpting. A sense of hierarchy forbids us to
praise results which, in our opinion, are not worthy of being praised,
but it can be painful
to
think about a poet, for example, who sends me
his new poem, who is proud of it, and expects me
to
praise it. I had a
choice: 1 could write
to
tell him that the poem is bad, or I could not
respond. This is not a made-up example; that is how I wounded Alek–
sander Janta, and it was the end of our friendship.
BALZAC, Honore de. Read mainly during the German occupation of
Warsaw by our threesome-Janka, Andrzejewski, and me. A brutal
writer, and a good one, especially for what was happening at that time.
May that threesome be with me in these pages, as we were then, and not
later on, wh en our fates diverged. Balzac came shortly after we pro–
duced in Dynasy, the neighborhood where Janka and I were living, the
first book of poetry
to
be printed (in about fifty copies) in the occupied
Editor's Note: Excerpted from
Mi/os.::;s ABCs
by Czeslaw Milosz, trans–
lated by Madeline C. Levine. Copyright
©
2000
by Czeslaw Milosz. To be
published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January
200 I.
All rights reserved.
