These are the points of departure; these are the phrases that trailed him after he’d become an acclaimed poet translated into many languages, after he’d found both friends and admirers throughout Europe, and not only Europe. But how did it come about that Zbigniew Herbert appeared in literature, in the world? Do you remember the newsreels from the early People’s Republic (my little memory asks me)? Shot in Soviet style, but trying to keep up the appearance of good breeding: gentlemen (comrades) in hats and suits sometimes pretending to work, shovel in a hand with well-trimmed nails. The apple trees are in bloom (spring was the favored season of the new regime’s master builders), garland-bedecked trucks set out for the country while an unseen choir sings; it seems the earth itself is singing. “Dynamism, angelology, distance,” as Galczynski put it. Dynamism—vast! Distance—boundless, especially when you gaze eastward. The newsreels suggested that the communist world, just and beautiful, never knew a moment’s rest. Even writers signed at top speed the books thrust toward them by starry-eyed readers.
And Zbigniew Herbert, the poet, existed in precisely this landscape for ten years (since something did change after 1956). Anyone who reads the biographies of great artists knows that they appear without warning—everywhere and nowhere, in a small town or the capital, in the family of a magnate or a lackey. It’s as if the enormous demographic machine busy producing nonstop our average, not especially highbrow humanity, fouled up occasionally and, crying “uh-oh,” brought into the world someone in whom a different light shines. When I think of Herbert tossed into a Soviet newsreel I experience something like a philosophical shudder—how could he, systematic and patient, calm, truthful, fundamentally honest, exist in that cruel express train of history?
Should I speak of Herbert’s writing or his life? We’re not supposed to talk about the life in our poststructuralist age. But the temptation is enormous. It’s true that timid, nervous writers and composers who exist exclusively through their work do turn up—like Dmitry Shostakovich, who belonged, so people write, to the ranks of the utterly inconspicuous, his presence in a room went entirely unremarked. Zbigniew Herbert was without doubt part of a different human family, he was one of those fortunates who radiate extraordinary charm. And those who were lucky enough to spend time with him should try—impossible job! you’d be better off with a camera and tape recorder—to describe this charm.
I couldn’t have known him in his earlier years; but sometimes I try to imagine him in Warsaw in the mid-fifties. I’ve heard a few anecdotes, reminiscences. I got to know him later, but even much later it was still possible to reconstruct his youth. And this was because he aged differently than most people, who undergo irreversible metamorphoses, becoming shadows of their former selves. Herbert changed differently. Time and ill health caused his youthful ego to surface more rarely, in hard times it fell silent and vanished, only to reappear once more, unscathed, as if he’d kept it under wraps. So it wasn’t as though the young, joyful, witty Herbert had disappeared completely. You met him less frequently, but he existed, he turned up until the very end, if only for brief moments. And even while mourning the defeat of the Home Army, the loss of independence, the tragic death of so many friends, the young Herbert still loved jokes in spite of everything, he kept his friends laughing, had fun. Once, so I’ve been told, he suddenly turned up in a large group of people dressed as a gypsy. But even in Paris in the late eighties, when he was already exhausted and seriously ill, he managed to make us laugh. While rising very slowly from a soft sofa, for example, he begged our pardon for his bungled takeoff, “like a Soviet cargo plane, not a Boeing.”
A strong poetic talent produces two contradictory phenomena. It suggests, on the one hand, intense participation in the life of your age, plunging into it up to your neck, an obsessive experiencing of actuality. It leads, on the other hand, to a certain kind of alienation, distance, absence. It is a ceaseless interplay of proximity and distance. Herbert’s own tomfoolery was one manifestation of this rhythm, this drawing close and pulling back. Poetry by its nature is not an entirely faithful daughter of its age; unfaithful, since she commands a secret hideout known only to herself in which she can always take refuge. Herbert’s jokes may have had their source in the amusement we find in the idea of poetry’s transcendence. Even minor transcendences stir our sense of humor.
Zbigniew Herbert was rather small. He had a kind, cheerful face, and kept his young man’s build for many years; there was something youthful about his features too.
He himself says in “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito”—not about himself, but about his hero:
beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I
(translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter)
I treat these words, taken from a marvelous poem, with the utmost caution (nota bene: the motif of the clown or jester appears in many poems from the Mr. Cogito cycle). I’m not a physiognomist and even the somewhat overwrought Max Picard, the author of the beautiful World of Silence, a book about the human face that was given to me by one of my American students, didn’t manage to persuade me to his views. But Herbert’s face—in “The Envoy”—isn’t the point. We know, though, from the poems themselves, that the author of Inscription eagerly returned to the motif of the clown, the buffoon, the jester, Sancho Panza.
Herbert’s face wasn’t the face of a tragic poet, whatever we take that phrase to mean. It was the kind of face the French call espiègle. There was something puckish in his eyes, as if—as long as he was in good shape—he were just waiting for a chance to crack a joke. Even when he grew serious, his face never completely lost its espiègle quality. I can’t help suspecting that there’s some subtle, very enigmatic bond between the face and the spirit.
There’s also a funny poem called “Mr. Cogito Looks at His Face in the Mirror” that ends with the words: “this is how I lost the tournament with my face.”
The lovely poem “The Seventh Angel,” in which we learn about Shemkel, a minor angel, introduces a theme that’s often found in Herbert, the theme of inferiority, mediocrity. In Shemkel’s case, though, the point is his kindness, which is contrasted with the priestly dignity of more comme il faut angels. Shemkel
is black and nervous
and has been fined many times
for illegal import of sinners
(translated by Czeslaw Milosz)
“The Seventh Angel” is one of his poems in the comic vein; these frequently juxtapose loftiness and nobility with the imperfection of the human comedy.
At the same time, Herbert’s voice, astonishing in its intensity, a deep, strong, beautiful voice, well modulated—although not at all artificial, theatrical in the negative sense—was the voice of the tragedian. The marvelous double nature of Herbert’s gift, both comic and tragic, or better, tragicomic, was thus somehow inscribed in his very person, his constitution! He was slight as a young man, but even then he had—or “bore”—that same remarkable, regal voice. I heard him speak for the first time at my high school in Gliwice. And I heard him many times afterward especially at readings, where he read his poems splendidly, forcefully, with conviction. The power of his voice—so it seemed—stemmed from his spirit, not his body. But when we saw him for the last time, two months before his death, that vibrant voice no longer greeted us (although as his wife and friends told us, it was much improved, far better than a couple of weeks earlier, when it had practically disappeared).
I met Herbert when I was seventeen. But of course that first meeting at the high school in Gliwice, where he appeared like a young Jupiter visiting a distant province, remained for many years a onetime affair, the stuff of legends. Still, it spurred my interest in Herbert’s work. From that time on, I bought all his books of poems, followed all his publications. My shelves held—and still hold!—Barbarian in the Garden with an inscription by the author: “From Z.H. to his colleague A.Z. with thanks
for the discussion, 4/25/63.” That “colleague” was a friendly joke, a generous forecast for the future, and so it was destined to remain for years. And of course back then this was the only book I had with a dedication from the author, if you didn’t count the copy of Irzykowski’s The Hag I found in my parents’ library, presented by Irzykowski to somebody whose name meant nothing to me.
I also remember how one acquaintance of ours from Gliwice, Mrs. K—but we must remember that Gliwice was then a colony of Lvov, and just as the Greeks living in Asia Minor spent long hours talking about Athens, the inhabitants of Gliwice were by and large preoccupied with discussing Lvov, which no longer existed in its prewar form—Mrs. K said to me, “Oh yes, Zbigniew, so he’s famous now? Of course I remember him perfectly, I played with him at my father’s parties, before the war, of course. We kids played while the grown-ups sat at the table.”
For me this was a revelation. That Mrs. K, famed among her friends more for her fabulous cakes than for knowing major poets—I should add that she also was an amateur composer whose occasional pieces were mailed off to various European monarchs and the pope—could speak familiarly of “Zbigniew” meant that she became from that moment a new person, for me at least. It also meant—and this was more significant—that Herbert, like the people in my parents’ circle, belonged among the ranks of those who had been disinherited from Lvov, cut to the heart by the loss of that extraordinary city. He thus belonged to the group of people in whom I specialized, like an anthropologist observing the customs of the Brazilian Indians (an anthropologist who discovers at some point that he’s an Indian too). With this difference—the exiles whose fates I could observe firsthand, in Gliwice, had chosen a sedentary life (had chosen or had simply been the victims of chance, of coincidence), while Herbert was a traveler. His homelessness was active and impatient, he lugged it like a large black trunk from one city to the next, from Torun to Gdansk, from Warsaw to Krakow, and later, after 1956, when the borders opened up a bit, from Paris to Italy, from Los Angeles to Berlin. If it’s really so much of a difference. Unreality may be static or dynamic. And nothing else. He could in principle have lived in my unreal town, in Gliwice, among the other immigrants. Dressed in a dark blue suit and white shirt, he could have gone to birthday parties at Mrs. K’s and praised her cakes in his extraordinary voice.
Later, much later, I found out from him that he’d been baptized in the church of St. Anthony in Lyczakow; and I knew that that was our parish church too! But as an exile he was infinitely discreet. He never called Lvov by name in his poems, he spoke of the “city,” as if the name itself were too painful, as if all other cities—and he knew so many—required names, and only this one city could get by just fine without one.
When I got to know him better, I realized that he didn’t entirely fit into the category of “exile from Lvov,” and this wasn’t just because he was a “famous” poet, as Mrs. K put it. In good years, at good moments, during periods when he could work under favorable or even tolerable circumstances, he became a perfectly “settled” person, for all his homelessness. At such times, he lived in his work, his writing, his thinking—and also in the history of art. This was another kind of doubleness; the poetry that was of course his chief calling joined forces with painting in his everyday practice. He loved cities that possessed great museums, great galleries (so he wouldn’t have been happy in Gliwice!). He wandered through them with his sketchbook, not for thirty minutes or an hour, like ordinary, distracted tourists, but for half a day, a whole day; he’d linger before one painting, one sculpture, and draw what he saw. These sessions also had enormous significance for his writing, since they were sessions in close observation. This observation was aided by his sketches and thus ceased to be the passive reception of impressions and became work, practice, action.
I recently saw a documentary shot in Berlin near the end of the sixties—I’m guessing ’69—that showed Herbert at the top of his form, still young and joyful. The film begins with a sequence shot during a poetry reading in the Berlin Akademie der Künste (the German translator Karl Dedecius is sitting next to him). Herbert reads his poems and wittily fields questions. For example, when one person asks, quoting Brecht’s famous poem, “Can you write about trees in our terrible age?” he responds with a question: “And what if the trees are unhappy?” Then he’s shown at home, in his study, a modest room, but decorated with reproductions of artworks, then in the museum in Dahlem—sketchbook in hand!—and on a stroll through one of Berlin’s forests. This short film shows the double nature of Herbert’s work very well, the coexistence of poetry and painting. Herbert belonged among those poets—Goethe is one great example, also England’s William Blake and our own Norwid—who are torn between two callings (or who, like Blake, work in both domains). But even once he had chosen poetry for good, he continued to require his painting, his sketchbook, long visits to art galleries, and serious readings in art history. Why? I think one motive may have been the desire to construct a solid workshop of sorts; perhaps he feared poetry’s vagaries. Poets often look with envy on painters and sculptors, on the materiality of their calling, the concreteness of their studios. Poets suspect that painters and sculptors are better equipped for rainy days, those days that produce no visible progress in your work, that offer no visionary moments. Poets assume that painters on their off days can take up some preliminary labors. Their sketchbook, moreover, serves as a fund of future projects, a storehouse of ideas; it thus has a stabilizing function and provides the artist with support in what comes close to a craftsman’s work. Poets fear the element in poetry that operates according to the principle of “all or nothing,” the ecstatic element that makes its presence felt perhaps more powerfully in poetry than in painting, that virtually excludes transitional, intermediate moments, that is like an Oriental potentate who either sleeps like the dead or, on waking, demands absolute submission. A poet’s notebook doesn’t have much to offer during periods of drought; it’s like a glass of water in the Sahara. What good is a studio without inspiration? This is why the poet envies the painter. He envies what he sees as the permanence, the security of the artist’s workroom, which persists even in melancholy.
But it also had something to do with “settling down.” Herbert was far less drawn to music than to painting. (He once said to me, joking, “You know, it’s always the same in music: first it’s happy, then it’s sad, then it gets happy again, allegro, andante, allegro—it’s too predictable!”) And once again you can explain it by “the nature of the talent,” by the type of gift he possessed. But I think that for a poet cast out of his patrimony, stripped of his inheritance, city, little homeland, who despises the political system of his native land, the magical legacy of the great ages of European art—dispersed among a hundred museums, visible in the architecture and landscapes of Italy, Greece, and France—was not a purely aesthetic domain. It also held out the possibility of refuge, a temporary home. Siena, through which he had wandered as a young vagabond—and which was made partly of the real, visible city, where kids scurry through narrow streets on scooters, and partly of frail memories from great, distant ages—offered a week of happiness. Dutch art, bourgeois in the noble sense of that word, fascinated him with its “dwelling,” its home, its roof over your head, it invited him to stay a bit, to take refuge within it.
There’s something ephemeral about music. You can’t see it, it has no address: you can’t say where Mozart’s quintet is located (at best, where its manuscript is kept), where Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring can be tracked down, where Chopin’s preludes are to be found. Whereas cathedrals are planted on the ground, Italian palaces don’t travel (that is, unless some crazy American billionaire decides to drag one off to a new continent), even paintings, though far more mobile than Romanesque churches, have always got to be somewhere. The Lady with the Ermine is in Krakow, the Madonna del parto is in Monterchi. Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte has been in the Art Institute of Chicago for a long time, a
nd to its admirers the equation Chicago = Seurat is far more self-evident than the famous but boundlessly commonplace 2 × 2 = 4 (where precisely is 2 × 2 = 4?). Once paintings, especially old ones, land in a museum, they seldom change hands. You may—must—make a pilgrimage to see them. You may live in them a bit, you may miss them.
It’s precisely because of this deep longing to settle into paintings and old buildings that Herbert’s essays on the art of France, Italy, and Holland, gathered in his lifetime into two volumes, Barbarian in the Garden and Still Life with a Bridle, are so remarkable. (A posthumous collection, The Labyrinth by the Sea, appeared recently.) I can imagine that great scholars—and we do still have great scholars—wouldn’t get much out of them and might even dismiss them. But these essays are permeated with a feeling that can’t be found in even the best histories of art, the most advanced interpretations. Herbert’s essays on art are marked by their lyricism. There in his essays we find almost the same lyricism that colors his poems—and that is the absolutely indispensable substance of his poetry, fusing it into one whole. In the essays it assumes an additional function, though; it tries to see, lovingly, if you could settle down in Siena, if you could dwell in Dordrecht, in Arles, in Greece.
It goes without saying that the passion for studying art history was at the same time a very natural continuation of his linguistic gift. His vast knowledge of art, built up through the years, was also a component of the broader, universal culture that was—although he never spoke of this directly—his dream, his utopian project, as if he hoped to resurrect the multifaceted artist of the Renaissance. The model, fairly common in our times, of the poet-specialist, the poet-idiot who reads almost exclusively (and not without envy!) his fellow contemporary poets, must have seemed utterly alien to him! He used his trips to study—study and not simply visit—the great European and American art galleries, to read in different languages, to give his passions free rein, to sate his curiosity. When I once asked him what he did when he couldn’t write poems, he answered: What a question, I read, I study, I learn! This splendid intention was, unfortunately, always threatened by his illnesses. The constant tug-of-war between these two forces—the will to learn, to advance, the will toward a universal, renaissance knowledge and intellect, on the one hand, and ignoble illness on the other—became through the decades the permanent backdrop for Herbert’s biography.
A Defense of Ardor Page 10