MAISONS-LAFFITTE, MAY 27, 1985
Dorogoi Misha,
I feel a great need to write you a letter. I’ve written and submitted to Kultura an article called “The Death of Cézanne,” and on the whole I thought I wouldn’t do any more writing, because apart from the fact that I’ve lost my sight, I’ve begun to lose words, so that sometimes I search for a single word all night, and if I still have traces of a need for créativité, it’s in letters. One of those letters is to you; I’ll tell you why. At that reception at Dimitrijevicz’s bookstore you and your wife pulled me and our nice friend from Switzerland aside for a conversation in that little empty café, and I truly felt very happy with you all. We started talking about Norwid, and it was a wonderful discovery for me that you’d read his letters and asked me about him with such attention and understanding as I’ve never come across in my life. And here I want to tell you about my wanderings with Norwid. I really discovered him in 1921 through my friend who had been in love with him and whose life and above all death is connected to Norwid in a way. It’s the one who died in a fire in the Warsaw Uprising because she wouldn’t and couldn’t abandon her old aunt, whom I had known and who was then already completely vyshedshaya iz uma (out of her mind). She was a music teacher who worked hard all her life. She lived from that music. My friend felt heavy pangs of conscience all her life toward her beloved mother, who had asked her always for one thing: for her daughter to be with her at the time of her death. But it happened that when the old lady was dying (it was during the first war) she was at the front with an antityphus team led by Dr. Dadej. She must have fallen in love with him at that time because she married him later on. And the old lady died completely alone. Hala Dadejowa carried that cruel pain with her throughout her life, that her mother had died alone. Miriam was one of two people (the first, for the second was Juliusz W. Gomulicki) who rescued Norwid from complete oblivion, devoting her life to him absolutely. In the Warsaw Uprising the first “cow” (you know what that means) fell in the courtyard on Mazowiecka where a group of boys was getting ready to do battle. It wounded and killed several of them. That same cow set fire to the roof over the house where Miriam lived, gravely ill. In the attic of that building was the last volume of the paperback edition of Norwid’s works, which Miriam hadn’t wanted to [sell] during the German occupation. Of course in saving the building people threw out all the copies of Norwid, which caught and hung on the branches of trees in the courtyard. Hala Dadejowa managed to gather a few of those volumes and bring them to my sister. It was Norwid who said after all that Poles will have a slaughter of innocents in every generation. That slaughter of innocents became oddly intertwined with the burning of his last volumes. And Hala, as if wishing to make up for the fact that she hadn’t been there at her mother’s death, refused to leave her old aunt, who during the uprising, on the same street where my sister lived, went up in flames together with Hala, completely absorbed in one thing: combing out her red wig. There’s nothing new about that, thousands of people died that way in Warsaw, and if I tell you this it’s because it’s oddly connected to the fire of the paperback volume (with Norwid’s philosophical writings), with the slaughter of innocents, and with Hala, to whom I owe my life with Norwid for almost twenty years, up to 1939.
But I didn’t mean to write you about all that; rather, about the Norwid problem. Here my closest friends are against me. Once in my life I asked Teresa1 to read me a poem of Norwid’s. She read it so badly, because so reluctantly, that I never spoke with her about Norwid again. It was the same with my relations with Wojtek Karpiński, whom I admire and love, but who has some sort of idiosyncrasy with regard to Norwid. Once he sensed some quote or half quote from Norwid in one of my letters, and he wrote me back or called me to say, “You promised never to quote Norwid at me!” I’m quite sure I never promised him that, because I wouldn’t betray Norwid even for him. I remember Teresa saying to me, irritated, “What was the point of making up a new Polish language?” Everything I’m writing may be imprecise, because I can’t check anything with my own eyes, but the point is this: Teresa and Wojtek are Polish classics, or let’s say pseudoclassics. And they are deaf to that other language, which of course Norwid didn’t invent, but it was the only form in which his spirit could express itself, and that form was infinitely far removed from Pan Tadeusz and Beniowski. “When I count the layers of the opened earth and see bones that like the banners of troops who perished under the spines of mountains testify to God of skeletons”—this text, which belongs equally to them and to me, also belongs to Norwid. I wonder, and that’s why I’m writing you this, how this was in Russia, for it’s from Pushkin, an unequaled poet, there’s a straight line to Akhmatova, and probably to Mandelstam too. I don’t know if they would be able to bear a Russian Norwid. But there were different languages there too, weren’t there? I’m mainly thinking of Rozanov here, not of Remizov, because Remizov’s language with its insertions of Russified French, those “devils with Salomonia who ate escalopes,” that was a language consciously deformed and enriched, such as Norwid’s Polish never was. I suspect Norwid of having an astonishing capacity for invention, which was however sometimes linked to clumsiness. You can’t detect a trace of that clumsiness in Remizov, who said himself that when he transposed legends from the Far East that traveled to France and Poland to White Russia, he treated them like precious icons in cases set with precious stones, to which he added a few more. It seems to me that here was the difference between Norwid and Remizov, and I remember just the shred of a shred of a Norwid poem in which he writes, “Lord I have no voice . . .” He made his living completely alone, living in emigration for decades and for long periods in real poverty, immersed in Greek, Latin, French—those were Norwid’s creative conditions, and how different from Rozanov, who lived in the living center of Russian life, but also from Remizov, who was a conscious connoisseur of Russian language from the remotest times, before there was even any French or German influence. I remember how I spoke to him with delight about his texts about those Russian printers who fled from Russia to Poland, and about the martyr’s death of one who was condemned to death in Moscow, whose surname I’ve forgotten again, and I asked him, “I understand where you get the details about the printers, but how do you know about the last moments of that martyr’s life?” And I remember how Remizov replied after a moment’s silence: “Eto iz dalekoi pamyati.” (That’s from distant memory.)
If I go on writing at such length it’s because I’m looking for an analogy in Russian literature, which of course is infinitely richer than what I have been able to listen in on. But I write you this also so you know what Norwid was and is to me. Take, for example, Krasiński, who wrote such bad poetry (“Reality slowly / into the ideal world growing / in a dream of silver and crystal”)—this was probably the first Polish poem that thrilled me at exactly age ten, but I don’t forget that Krasiński wrote the Non-Divine Comedy and had a great intelligence that was certainly greater than Mickiewicz’s. And I don’t know if you know Krasiński’s impressions from his first meeting with Norwid, when he called him “a hundred little lights under an alabaster lampshade.” Krasiński always valued Norwid and visited him in Paris. In one of his letters Norwid recalls, “I’m writing in the corner where you sat.” Even if I never had the strength to read Norwid’s vast poetic texts to the end, there are in his incomparable poems and letters treasures apparently inaccessible to our pseudoclassics. I’m sending you a little book that my eyes can’t reach anymore, but you won’t find “Letter to Włodzimierz Łubieński” in it.
And you will reproach me for feeling so much grief
over a Greek column glazed by a wave of the sea!
That I had the tears for it as if it were a tomb;
When so many pains and sorrows are sung today.
Rightly you reprove me, but let me wrongly grieve . . .
Apart from that there’s another poem about the lure of bad art: “I thought that the lyre and style . . .”—I can’t remember the rest; the poem ends with a painted windowpane—you believe it’s real, because it has green meadows and in the embrace of the fantasy you throw yourself at the pane, behind which gapes an abyss.
MAY 28, 1985
Yesterday I wanted to write you a letter about Norwid and I found myself suddenly writing so much that it turned into a badly constructed article. Today I’d like to end with what I should have started with: why those volumes with Norwid’s letters, which I think contain letters of genius as well as ones that leave me more or less cold, why I became so attached to them, and even they to me. I received the two volumes barely a few weeks after arriving at Starobielsk, or less. It was the only parcel that reached me from Poland, letters aside. It was sent me by Adolf Rudnicki, a writer with whom I’d been friends, though that friendship ended somehow in Paris, probably mainly because of a novella he published in what was already Communist Poland, whose title I don’t remember, but which spoke of me under a false name from beginning to end. Rudnicki showered me with lavish compliments as a painter and colleague, but ended by saying that this person, I, in other words, who had too much love for Germany to believe that the Germans could have committed the Katyń massacre, naively believed and spread the terrible libel that it was the Russians who had committed it. I met Rudnicki after the war in Paris. I didn’t yet know anything about his story. I gave him a copy of my Memories of Starobielsk. As a result of my not knowing his story, I didn’t understand why he was so strangely embarrassed in front of me. Then I read the story, wasn’t too bothered by it, but nevertheless Rudnicki told me after reading my Memories of Starobielsk that he would never publish that story of his again. Which didn’t mean that there wasn’t a literary event with Polish writers three days later at our embassy building, which by then had passed into the hands of the Polish Communist government. And that among the texts read was that whole story about me, read by Rudnicki. To the genuine dismay of several Poles who knew me, attended the reading, and naturally recognized me at once.
Returning to Norwid’s books: I had them with me throughout my time in the Starobielsk camp and my whole time in Russia and the Middle East. After leaving Russia at some breakfast with the representative of our embassy in Cairo, I met a sympathetic British officer who had just arrived from London. I was surprised to see him carrying a very fat book, and in Polish. And this was at the time of the great battles in the desert with the British near Cairo and in Tobruk, where there were Polish divisions, there was such a lack of cargo planes that those, like this officer, who came from England were weighed, so they didn’t carry a grain of superfluous weight with them, and here he was carrying a heavy Polish book. That book was Norwid! He confessed to me that he was translating a volume of Polish poetry into English with a Polish friend. As it happened, a few days before Monte Cassino, I met that officer again in a little café in Campobasso where all the soldiers and officers used to meet, drink, and sing, and he simply begged me to lend him my two volumes of Norwid overnight. He gave them back to me the next day and admitted that the first time he had really wanted to steal something, it was that volume. Much later after the war I received from him the book A Polish Anthology with this moving dedication: “For Major Józef Czapski I send the present book as an expression of gratitude and as a request for help and collaboration. Maurice Michael, Christmas 1944.” But more important still is that the book, filled to the brim with poems, English translations on one side and Polish originals on the other, is preceded by an insightful introduction by the same officer, whose name was Michael, and his Polish collaborator’s name was T. M. Filip. This book is truly exceptional, because you sense in it a real obsession with Polish poetry, from Kochanowski to our times. I don’t know if it’s a good translation, but this memorial to Polish-English friendship should not be forgotten. I add in any case a memento, a copy of the title page. Years later I met the sympathetic Michael again, but by then he had left off with Poland and was busy with other translations. So he was the first foreigner I met during the war who spoke to me with such unmatched enthusiasm of Norwid. The second foreigner I met in the war was the son of a well-known antiquarian bookseller in Rome, who among the books he had on sale had a big book, the guest book of some great Polish lady, maybe Branicka, maybe someone else, in which visitors entered their names, adding poems or drawings. I spoke to him about Norwid and even tried to translate one of his poems for him. That young man also developed an interest in Norwid and in gratitude for our Norwidian conversations gave me a beautiful watercolor (or rather a lavies) of Norwid, which shows a woman walking out from under a monument amid funereal statuary. It was surely a thought of Poland rising from the dead. That picture came from the book, the young man cut it out for me. When the Saint Casimir dedicated one room to Norwid, for he was said to have died in that room, I gave them the picture to hang there. That Italian to whom I owe the picture was the second person I met who had caught the Norwid bug. The third is you. These two volumes of Norwid, which traveled with me from Starobielsk, via Cairo and Rome all the way here and which I always have with me, with numbers of pages dear to me noted down in front and back, are now splendidly bound in cloth, so they won’t fall apart. While I could read I kept returning to the letters and I can truly say, to infuriate my Norwid-hating friends, that this book played a great role in my life. For indeed I would be moved by Norwid read in even the most reluctant way. “Dismissed, gibberish,” the well-known Polish writer Julian Klaczko said of him, he who even played a big role in the Revue des deux mondes. Later I was a witness to Norwid’s slowly growing fame and his sudden, unexpected popularity during the German occupation. Norwid’s reputation began as an unreadable and obscure poet, and ended by being spoken of contemptuously as a typical writer for quoting in immature ladies’ albums. The fact that you who spoke to me about these books with such attention and with such a sense of who Norwid is moved me deeply. Forgive me, because you really don’t have time to read this letter long as a tapeworm but I felt the need to tell someone about the long journey of these two volumes, which I wouldn’t wish to perish after my death. Just as I wouldn’t want my volume of Michael’s translations to perish, when I don’t know if there’s another copy remaining beside mine. I include with this letter a little book of Norwid’s poetry that my eyes can no longer reach.
Cordially,
Józef