CZESLAW MILOSZ
175
aware of Stalin's double game is unknown. In Spain, Koestler, Dos Pas–
sos, and George Orwell came to understand it.
I met Koestler in Paris, probably in 1951. His physical form
explained a great deal. He was harmoniously built and handsome, but
tiny, almost a dwarf, and this may have contributed to his Napoleonic
ambitions and pugnaciousness, which made it difficult for him to func–
tion in any group. It was he, after all, who came up with the idea of
working among the West European intellectual circles in order to cure
them of Marxism, and the Berlin Congress of the Defenders of Cultural
Freedom in 1950 was his work, and from it evolved the American Con–
gress of Cultural Freedom in Paris, but Koestler himself was swiftly
maneuvered out of there. Later, living in England, he limited his inter–
ests in Eastern totalitarianism to creating a fund to help emigre writers.
He dedicated some of his royalties to that end.
My relations with him were eminently collegial, although superficial.
We never got into a serious conversation. During the 1960s, he traveled
in the United States with his much younger girlfriend or wife. They paid
us a visit in Berkeley. As on many similar occasions, I was in an uncom–
fortable position. For him, I was the author of
The Captive Mind,
a
book which he had read and valued, but in my own mind I was some–
one entirely different, the author of poems which he knew nothing
about. I don't ascribe my bad behavior during their visit, however, to
this divergence in our fields. Simply I, the host, drank too much and fell
asleep, which [ confess with a sense of shame, and it seems to me that I
offended him without meaning to at all. Were it not for his small
stature, with its attendant excessive pride, perhaps he might have seen
this in a better light.
He was, it seems, above all a man of nineteenth-century positivism,
whose two branches-the nationalist and the socialist-both attracted
him for a certain time. His strong humanitarian sentiments made him
work against the English penalty of death by hanging, and later he
fought for a law permitting euthanasia. He was an adherent of euthana–
sia and proved it in practice. He and his young wife were found
together, seated sicle by side in armchairs, dead.
WHITMAN,
Walt. "The priest departs," he wrote, "the divine literatus
comes." All-embraci ng, a II-devou ri ng, blessi ng everyth ing, tu rned to the
future, a prophet. The astonishing linkage of the word ancl the historical
victory of America. Despite my adoration, however, [ knew that it
would be useless for me pretend
to
closeness if the civilization to which
I was linked was afraid to support the freedom of the individual.
