Milosz in California
On a poet, exile, and being a serious person
“… on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where the border of ocean and land, shattered into promontories, looks like the first day of creation…”
— Czeslaw Milosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay1
I was stunned to learn recently that the poet Czeslaw Milosz spent most of his time in exile in the San Francisco Bay Area.
This knowledge came from Eva Hoffman’s lovely new monograph about him, On Czeslaw Milosz: Visions from the Other Europe, which came out in 2023 as part of Princeton University Press’s “Writers on Writers” series. I bought the book a bit randomly some time ago, having noticed it on a table in a bookstore in Copenhagen just as I was leaving, already late to be somewhere else.
I don’t often get to bookstores like this, and in all the hurry decided to take the book just on the strength of the author and the jacket copy. I wasn’t at that point interested in Milosz himself, whose name evoked only a vague sense of a serious twentieth century writer. But I had admired Hoffman’s 1989 memoir, Lost in Translation, when it came out, and the blurbs on the back of her new book, one by Ruth Padel, a poet I also admire, and one by a writer I don’t know named Roy Foster, were intriguing.
Foster’s begins like this: “One great Polish authority on exile, displacement and memory meets another in Eva Hoffman’s subtle and succinct study.”
I experienced a sense of something like exile for a long time after I moved away from California in the late 1970s.
I was 12, and glad to leave Bolinas, the small town on the Pacific coast, a little north of San Francisco, where I had lived from when I was about seven.
But Bolinas was also home, a place of land and sea and wildness.
It was where Monarch butterflies used to migrate by the tens of thousands every year, stopping always in the same grove of trees on Terrace Avenue, opposite the house of a pair of married poets.
It was where stunningly beautiful driftwood and abalone shells on the beach were as common as dandelions in my garden here in Sweden. We’d regularly go down to one of the beaches and gather them to make necklaces or wind chimes.
It was where life was filled with music and art, as well as nature and the sea. The progressive public school had its own potters’ wheels and kilns, and an old bus where older kids learned how to work with metal. There was a woodshop where one learned how to hold a hammer and how to sand something into beauty. In the chorus I learned songs that still live in my head today and form part of my cultural heritage.
Every year, the town put on a musical, usually with plenty of roles for the kids; all of the other parts, and the orchestra, were performed by adults in town.
There was a weekly film series down in the community centre.
We slept outside, under the stars.
And yet I’d been so lonely there.
I could not figure out what was good and what was bad about it, what I wanted to keep of it and what I wanted to be free of, and why.
When I got around to opening Hoffman’s book, a few months after buying it, it was astounding to see that it might offer a way in to thinking about that. Milosz, it turned out, had been an adult in exile in the same time and place that I, as a child, had been eager to leave but had for a long time felt myself in voluntary exile from, half-longing to return but finding it too painful to imagine doing so.
Born in 1911, he wrote about the lost countryside of his childhood on his Polish-speaking grandparents’ farm in Lithuania with an urgency that mirrors how I evoke the physical landscape of my own childhood.
Hoffman quotes briefly from an essay of his:
A path in the shade of oaks led down to the river, and my river was never to abandon me throughout my life, wherever fate carried me, even during my years on the far shore of the Pacific.2
Where fate had carried him included the nightmare of Warsaw during the war, the loss of his friends and world to the Warsaw Uprising or to concentration camps, and finally exile in first Paris and then California.
His time of exile began after the war and a brief stint as a diplomat for the Polish government. Hoffman explains that although he was part of a lively intellectual scene in France, which was culturally and geographically familiar to him, he was having trouble finding work to support himself and his family.
In 1960 the University of California at Berkeley offered him a solution; a faculty position in Slavic literature. He took it, and he stayed. According to Wikipedia, some of his UC Berkeley colleagues were doubly surprised when he unexpectedly won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980; many had not realised that he was a writer as well as a teacher.3
In fact he was writing and publishing both poetry and prose in Polish throughout his decades in California. In collaboration with the poet Robert Haas, Hoffman tells us, he also brought out a highly influential anthology of translations of Polish poets into English.
One of the prose volumes he published during this time, which is probably considered a minor work by most but that is frequently, and interestingly, cited by Hoffman, is a collection of essays called Visions from San Francisco Bay. It came out in Polish in 1969; an English translation appeared some years later.
Its first words: “I am here.”
I ordered a copy of the essays via interlibrary loan.
Here is more of that opening passage;
I am here. Those three words contain all that can be said — you begin with those words and you return to them. Here means on this earth, on this continent and no other, in this city and no other, and in this epoch I call mine, this century, this year. I was given no other place, no other time, and I touch my desk to defend myself against the feeling that my own body is transient.4
These are, it seems to me, the words of a serious person. The kind of person I wanted to grow up to be, when I was 12.
For decades after I left Bolinas I had dreams in which I returned there. I would be walking down one of the roads, knowing myself to be in grade school, and feeling that something was not right. Eventually, in the dream, I would remember that in fact I had left, that I had already graduated from grade school, and even from high school. Over the years, that moment in the dream expanded to encompass whatever schooling I had had since then, so that it went from having already graduated grade school to having also already finished high school, and then university, and so forth. Each of those brought an enormous sense of relief: not that I had “accomplished” those things, but that each one represented a further progression of age, of experience, of not being a small child whose only world was Bolinas.
It was the intensity of that relief, that gladness to be waking up as an adult, that explained why I could not go back, even as the dream had also been magical, to be walking again the unpaved roads of Bolinas, smelling the salt air, seeing the wildflowers and fog and hearing the sound of the sea.
When I finally did go back on a short visit, when I was in my 40s, I went by train, three days and three nights from Boston to San Francisco.
It was the only way I could imagine going there again: slowly, with an entire continent to break the sense of transition.
The train went past pillars of fog on Lake Erie and over a Northern stretch of the Mississippi River. It went up and across the Continental Divide, and through the impossible landscape at the bottom of the Ruby Canyon in Utah.
On the third day it came to the Sierra Mountains in California, where for the first time since I was 12, everything — the trees, the colours, the light — looked like home.
Agonisingly, though, it did not pause there, but only passed through; and no doors opened. The train had its own climate system, with un-opening windows and air-conditioning that stripped the atmosphere of any smells or texture of the world outside. This was home at last, but in a glass bubble that divided me from touching, smelling, or feeling the three-dimensionality of it. I almost cried, there on the train, at that separation from the land that was the land of my childhood.
When, hours later, a little before San Francisco, I could finally step out of the glass and metal bubble and smell and feel the salt air on my skin, the air felt right for the first time in 30-odd years.
For all of my adult life, between leaving California and then, I’d been going to seashores on the East coast of the US, where I lived, trying unsuccessfully to find this air again.
The environmentalist friend who met me at the station explained it. The world’s continental winds blow west to east, he said. The ocean air we were breathing at that moment had been over the sea for thousands of miles, laden with salt and sea water.
On the eastern shores, the air had come its longest distances over land.
It was simply different, and my body had known that, over all that time, even without understanding why.
As I riffled through Hoffman’s book and Milosz’s San Francisco-area essays, I was looking to understand what he made of the natural landscape he had landed in, which was so dear to me; and what he made of the culture of that time and place, which I had seen only with a child’s eyes.
I saw that he had, amazingly, touched on both.
On the natural world, here is a longer version of the passage from the 1969 collection that I placed at the top of this essay:
… [O]n the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where the border of ocean and land, shattered into promontories, looks like the first day of creation, I stand stripped and destitute, I have not achieved anything, I have taken no part in in evolution or revolution, I can boast of nothing, for here the entire collective game of putting oneself above or beneath others falls apart.
[….]
[T]he magnificent expanse of the Pacific seacoast has imperceptibly worked its way into my dreams, remaking me, stripping me down, and perhaps thereby liberating me. 5
And here is a poem from 1971 that Hoffman includes in its entirety in her book:
The Gift
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over
honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to
possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that I was once the same man did
not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea
and sails.Except for the sails, and the sight rather than the sound of the sea, this could have been written in our garden in Bolinas.
It matters to me that he wrote like this, because it means that he was indeed fully there, as he says he is with the opening words “I am here.”
Had he not been fully there, then I don’t think that I would be interested in his take on the culture; it would be the take of a visitor, superficial and likely judgemental.
I must admit that my first reaction to a quote from a private letter by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, written at about the same time, in which he ridicules the young hippies in his poetry classes at Berkeley, was to think less of Heaney, and to be defensive of the students, of all the things that they were facing in the middle of the overseas war that their cohort was being drafted into and dying in.
My sense was that Heaney is not really there, not really seeing what he is describing, in that moment of writing that letter.
But Milosz seems to be there, where he is, at least as encountered in the only two sources I’ve looked at, Hoffman’s study and his own San Francisco Bay essays.
Two sets of passages from his essays, in particular, stood out as I leafed through their pages looking for his take on the hippie movement (Bolinas, where I lived a few years after he wrote, was a hippie town).
The first was in a short piece on the writer Henry Miller.
I was thrilled that he had written on Miller, because Miller, I’ve always felt, was part of the puzzle of Bolinas. He’s a much-loved writer — writers I admire, and love reading, love him — and yet I hated his books when I read them, about the same time I was reading Anaïs Nin’s diaries, when I was still living there.
Was it because I was simply too young? I must have been 10 or 11 when I picked them up off my parents’ shelves. I don’t remember the storylines or the prose at all, or even which of his novels they were, and I have not reread them since then. I just remember that I disliked them; and I know that I was too young mainly because I remember my normally unflappable hippie teacher’s face turning red when I showed her one of the books and asked doubtfully if it was really possible to make babies just by talking. (I was confused by the way the words “oral” and “sex” frequently appeared together as a phrase.)
Or was there something about the atmosphere of the books themselves…?
Milosz writes:
Henry Miller was so extreme in opposing his own person to everything outside of it that he rejected literature as a collection of inherited patterns, in order to stand unique, to say a Mass to himself [….] To me, that Miller seemed like a medium in a trance. A medium shouting, shaken by a powerful current, whose violent gestures, vulgarities and floods of inventive were clearly directed against some enemy, though his yammering made it impossible to decide who or what that enemy was.
[….]
The enemy tormenting Miller in his hypnotic trance has no face or body, it cannot be caught, struck, wounded, it eludes names and diagnoses. Perhaps it is the technological civilisation of the twentieth century, the supposed blind alley where we have been driven by our unhealthily active minds, or human society in general, or America — first it seems one, then the other, and the images flow into each other.
[….]
Miller was one of the first prophets of withdrawal into the purely personal dimension, what we could call the sexual-mystical dimension, and as well one of the first in the daily practice to withdraw from the sound of “getting and spending” to a primitively furnished cabin in Big Sur.7
These words brought me a sense of relief. It’s not, I think, that I was reading Miller too young. The writers I loved at that same age in Bolinas were Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, all of whom were usually read by people a little older.
I read their stuff over and over again back then (along with Mark Twain’s tall tales and a bunch of other wonderful writers whom one would not always read at those ages).
These writers were all grappling lightly, but seriously, with how a society should be: with the question of examining assumptions about the existing rules and thinking through what the alternatives were. They wrote on the supposition that there was a responsibility not just to question, but also to find answers.
Milosz’s lines on Miller solved, for me, a tiny piece of the puzzle.
When I read Miller I was living in a town with very few rules, where adults mostly did what they wanted, and where I was taught to do whatever I wanted.
The town was wonderful, and generous, and open. I think for instance that Mim, whom I’ve written about here, was close to living on her own on the street, and might have been, anywhere other than Bolinas. There, she was supported and loved.
I loved all of that, but there was something missing, and this helps to get at it.
Miller, from Milosz’s account, is all about breaking free, and about the individual.
In a separate essay, in the same volume, looking at the hippie culture of the 60s, Milosz is interested, and curious, and not dismissive.
…[W]hat if….entire neighborhoods spring up populated by people not fussy about their housing, who live on milk and fruit, walk around in tattered sweaters, but, on the other hand, have time to read, write, paint, and do not take part in the ‘rat race’?8
He sums up what seem to be the views he is witnessing on money and enterprise, the workings of a larger society:
Moloch, considered hideous and inhuman by the longhairs, does not and will never, in their opinion, submit to human control; rather, it is Moloch who swallows up those who would like to control him. All that remains is to withdraw, so that his breath poisons us as little as possible, and to divest oneself of responsibility.9
(Emphasis added)
Responsibility.
I realised, on reading this, that the authors I loved assumed responsibility was a good thing. Miller, perhaps, did not. And perhaps the era itself did not. It comes up in memoirs of that time, not just in the counterculture, and not just in the US.
Not long ago, shortly after reading these passages from Milosz and struggling to make a link between elements in this essay that I sensed ought to be linked, I was chatting with someone about the difference between care and indulgence.
I’d been complaining about my lack of ability to deal with minor medical things, a doctor’s appointment that I’d been putting off making. “Do you think that you’re not worthy of a doctor’s appointment?” she asked.
I laughed. I am one of the most self-indulgent people I know, I told her. Of course that was not the question.
“Indulgence is not the same as care,” she said.
And with that, it all fell into place.
Bolinas was free, and one could do anything one wanted. One could stay up late, and decide to stop brushing one’s hair, and go walking alone on the beach before one knew about the need to be on solid land before the tides rose and took the beach away.
One could learn to indulge oneself, with some excellent outcomes (I have never worried about what other people might think when making decisions for myself, for instance).
But none of that is the same as care.
This morning, writing this, I was so caught up that I decided to keep going instead of eating. There is also not really anything in the house to eat.
I would never, ever, allow someone under my care to go so long without a good meal, or to have a lack of food in the house, just so that I could write. Doing it to myself is indulgence, not care.
Bolinas, I think, was a place of generousity and freedom and a kind of reasonably wholesome indulgence. But it may not have been a place of responsibility.
I was unhappy in school in Bolinas, despite all of the art and the music. The year we left, I spent a semester in San Francisco at a rigorous French and English-language private school. For the first time, I was happy in school.
Learning there was taken seriously, and it was assumed that one would put in the effort to learn, and that one would be provided with the tools to do so. I made friends who also cared about these things, and had people to talk to.
In all of these years, I thought that I was drawn by the fact that the school was academically serious. I thought that I wanted to grow up to be a serious person, and that the path to that, for me, was a certain kind of study.
Now, after reading Milosz, I wonder if it wasn’t really much simpler. I wonder if it isn’t simply that the school, by having serious expectations, provided care, as opposed to indulgence.
And that what I valued then, and still value, is not in fact being a serious person, whatever that might mean; but being a responsible person, which can take a million different forms.
Milosz himself was a responsible person, from Hoffman’s telling. She sees him as being driven, in his work, by a sense of duty, above all of remembering those people and cultures that he had witnessed and seen lost. Perhaps that is why he pivoted so easily to the question of responsibility when he looked at the beginnings of the counterculture in the new landscape where he had ended up.
I like it, in any case, the thought that he — whom, I must say again, I have never read except for in these two books (but whom you should read; not so much these essays, from which I have cherry-picked, and in which I found a fair bit to disagree with, but the poetry: many of the poems that Hoffman quotes are extraordinary) — was someone whose views, then, might add something today.
Thank you to
, , , , , , , , , , , and for recommending Pen, Book and Garden: Notes from Linnesby to their readers.Follow-ups to this essay:
Other essays that may be of interest:
“Facing Too Large an Expanse,” in Czeslaw Milosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay (hereafter “Visions”), translated by Richard Lourie, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982 (originally published in Polish in 1969), pp. 9-11, at p.10.
Eva Hoffman, On Czeslaw Milosz: Visions from the Other Europe, Princeton University Press, 2023, p.6, citing an essay titled “Happiness.”
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czesław_Miłosz.
“My Intention,” in Visions, pp. 3-5, at p. 3.
“Facing Too Large an Expanse,” in Visions, pp. 9-11, at p.10.
Hoffman, p. 138. The poem appeared in New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001, translated by Milosz and the poet Robert Haas.
“Henry Miller,” in Visions, pp.136 -140, at pp. 137 - 138.
“The Formless and the New,” in Visions, pp. 122-131, at p. 125.
“The Formless and the New,” in Visions, pp. 122-131, at p. 126.
Maria, I love this essay of yours so much, especially because you gave this reader a glimpse into how you wrestled to connect the pieces - that is personal essay writing in a nutshell. You also remind me how much I like Milosz’s poetry, the “thereness” of it. As I’ve told you before, I know that landscape well, having grown up in the Bay Area in the same era, and you really landed on the central contradiction of Bolinas and hippie counterculture in general - indulgence vs the kind of responsibility for others that real care involves. We’re still living with far too much validation of individual indulgence, something that has become truly icky to me in the libertarian era of tech billionaires.
I recently read a novel from the library, “The Witches of Bellinas,” which is a riif on Bolinas if a tech bro took it over and became a local guru. I doubt you’d like it - I didn’t much, but it made me think of you and a far more nuanced portrait of a place 😉
So much of this resonates. The recurring dream.. in mine, I shed HS with the realization I have my Masters degree and I don’t have to do whatever the thing is in my dream. . an exam. A social scene. Also, for years and years, after visiting “the old country” of my grandparents, I dreamt of returning, of a train I was supposed to get on to go back. To Sweden.
As for indulgences vs care, as a child of painters in Brooklyn in the 70s, indulgences were everywhere, but often not the structure needed to feel secure… endemic to childhood in that era, I think. Gorgeous piece, Maria.