A Defense of Ardor Read online

  Even if they were lucky enough to escape the Lubyanka, the poets of Central Europe knew full well about the existence of these two currents and they understood Wat’s perception perfectly. Not all of them drew radical conclusions from Wat’s change of heart. But one poet who would surely have agreed with Wat was Zbigniew Herbert.

  One day Herbert showed up at our high school in Gliwice. Our high school was not exactly a hotbed of poetry, to put it mildly. All our time was taken up with parties, first dates, bike rides, Elvis Presley, Chubby Checker, and Little Richard, to say nothing of life itself, which we understood mainly as fairly shallow musings on a very distant future. If the school’s more ambitious students (I will admit to being one of them) read anything more serious, our taste was dictated by current fashion. We read the theater of the absurd, which filled the “Notebook” section of the journal Dialogue. And we adored bleak writing: the pitiless Kafka, with his gaunt, malnourished face, was our god. Our own country’s writers didn’t especially interest us; we were snobs. (Small countries often rebuff their own writers.)

  This young man was already a famous poet, even if he was better known among the Warsaw and Krakow cognoscenti than among us provincials. Meeting high school students at one in the afternoon must have been utter drudgery, a way to pick up the modest fee provided by the district superintendent. (He had probably lectured that morning at a school in Bytom, and was likely en route to a reading in Katowice later that evening.) But his visit changed my view of literature. Not right away; but slowly and steadily. I followed his work attentively from then on, and I noticed that, unlike certain absurdists, Herbert had no parti pris, no a priori theory of the world. In place of dogma, I found a flexible, unforced, search for meaning; flexible, like a person crossing an Italian town at dawn. His poetry was marked by the war, by the occupation, by the dingy totalitarianism of the Soviet state. But it retained a certain humanist buoyancy, a serenity.

  Zbigniew Herbert died in July of 1998 at the age of seventy-three. It may still be too soon to seek his work’s “defining formula.” (Perhaps such formulas are best ignored in any case.) But he’s important to my argument on “high style.” He was a poet who never settled into a single stylistic costume. He opposed what he called “whimpering” (and this from the poet of a country that in modern history had known more defeats than victories!). As he wrote in his poem “Why the Classics”:

  if art for its subject

  will have a broken jar

  a small broken soul

  with a great self-pity

  what will remain after us

  will be like lovers’ weeping

  in a small dirty hotel

  when wall-paper dawns

  (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)

  “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” remains Herbert’s great hymn. It is a poem in which skepticism joins hands with the sublime, in which the “clown’s face” speaks great words:

  Go where those others went to the dark boundary

  for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

  go upright among those who are on their knees

  among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

  you were saved not in order to live you

  have little time you must give testimony

  be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

  in the final account only this is important

  and let your helpless Anger be like the sea

  whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

  let your sister Scorn not leave you

  for the informers executioners cowards—they will win

  they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth

  the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

  and do not forgive truly it is not in your power

  to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

  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

  beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring

  the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

  light on a wall the splendor of the sky

  they don’t need your warm breath

  they are there to say: no one will console you

  be vigilant—when the light on the mountain gives the sign—arise and go

  as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

  repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends

  because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain

  repeat great words repeat them stubbornly

  like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

  and they will reward you with what they have at hand

  with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

  go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls

  to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

  the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

  Be faithful Go

  (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter)

  We are so prosaic, so ordinary. Do we even deserve poetry? But we, too, will be legends for future generations, because we once lived, and our word will mean more than we care to admit today.

  3 Nietzsche in Krakow

  I discovered Nietzsche’s writings during my student years. I scoured Krakow’s used book stores for them when it was still relatively easy to come upon beautiful editions of Nietzsche’s work from the early years of the century, as translated by first-rate Polish writers and poets under the imprint of “Jakob Mortkowicz, Publisher.” You couldn’t find Nietzsche in bookstores carrying current publications, though, since Nietzsche had been officially denounced—in all the so-called socialist realist countries, I suspect—as “a precursor of fascism.” But who hadn’t been denounced? Nietzsche found himself in good company. Czeslaw Milosz, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron had all been condemned, along with many others. Whoever didn’t like totalitarianism and came right out and said so ended up on the blacklist. To be fair—and here I hear the voice of some retired censor pointing out my error—Nietzsche was actually on a different list, where his neighbors were Celine, Goebbels, Mein Kampf, the works of the Italian fascist ideologists, and so on. That’s all well and good, but the fact remains that he couldn’t be found in normal bookstores, and all you had to do was read around in twentieth-century literature, whether poetry or prose, to come upon the tracks of a mysterious writer, different from the rest, belonging to a separate category—the tracks of a master who didn’t write a single novel, a poet unlike “ordinary” poets, a writer who made the essay his chief weapon, an artist who died a lunatic after years of wandering through the countries of Southern Europe. The encyclopedias we had on hand said nothing. They explained in their lapidary, lying style that he was “a precursor of fascism who paved the way for bourgeois irrationalism,” or something equally idiotic. But no one particularly trusted the encyclopedias put out by the communists, so you had to look elsewhere, seek out those fine old books published at the turn of the century. Sometimes you’d stumble on a photograph, always the same one, a man with a mustache and thick dark hair, very serious, intense, slightly affected.

  Nietzsche was a mysterious figure to me and my contemporaries back in the seventies. We knew something about his unhappy love affair with the beautiful Russian Lou Andreas, about his illness, his alpine strolls, his ghastly migraines. But we couldn’t be sure, we lacked particulars. Things must have been completely different in the West, of course, where there was no dearth of scholarly studies, biographies, bibliographies, where Nietzsche’s place in the nineteenth-century tradition was debated, to be sure, but no one was in doubt about the basic facts. Eastern Europe’s belatedness—caused by the war and the communist censorship
, since there’d been no problem with studying or simply reading Nietzsche before—was in a certain sense a blessing, since it allowed us to experience the same shiver of emotion that his first readers must have felt, representatives of the first generation to fall under the author of Zarathustra’s spell. Nietzsche emerged from anonymity, after all, only in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and very little was known about him at first. By stripping Nietzsche of his right to literary existence, the communist censorship locked him up, after its own fashion, in a lunatic asylum and unwittingly restored the glory of the poète maudit.

  Apart from the legend of the author, though, what struck me in Nietzsche’s own texts? I began, I think, with The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All-Too-Human, and The Dawn—but the sequence in which I read them was dictated, I should add, by which books I managed to track down in the used book stores, and then in the larger libraries. By chance, though, it turned out to be more or less the order in which the books appeared. My first readings of Nietzsche endure in my memory as a festival of freedom; there was something liberating in their message. After all, who’s better equipped than a young poet to respond to the young Nietzsche, whose strongest defense was his intoxicating solitude, his sense of his own genius, his inner freedom, and finally—perhaps most important—his sense that the essential energy of any human creation, cultural or otherwise, escapes the notice of the age’s learned authorities. These great scholars, who seem to know everything, who’ve counted the disks of the vertebrates and the syllables in Archilochus’ poems, can’t manage to identify whatever it is that catalyzes human minds and creativity. They analyze the outcome, but are blind to its essence; they study the fire but can describe only its ashes. And as we know, Nietzsche gleefully calls this principle that the scholars overlook none other than life itself.

  But there was something else that proved sympathetic to a young poet: the scorn with which this philologist and philosopher treated the state, the challenge he cast at the newly formed German Reich, the autonomy of an intellect that mocked the might of the Germans united by Bismarck. I liked this for two reasons. First, I was of course taken with his mockery of the state, living as I did under the rule of the totalitarian, Khrushchevian-Brezhnevian-Gomulkovian system and half consciously seeking allies in the challenging acrobatic act of liberating oneself from the ideological and administrative constraints of Marxism. There was also another reason: here was someone who came right out and proclaimed his intellectual independence, who didn’t fret about the historical stage sets, who spoke from within his own spirit, and spoke, moreover, with such buoyancy and brilliance, whose language was so phenomenally pure, plastic, and full. To resist the automatism of a specific historical reality—in Nietzsche’s case, Bismarck’s Reich—meant something more than a political challenge alone. It was also a declaration—like a customs declaration—of his own spiritual resources, his personal wealth, which had no need for bureaucrats and political structures. Could I have found a better ally? Here was a philosopher who, dismissing all risks, ignoring all external authorities, not only challenged the Leviathan but did so carelessly, without giving a second thought to the monster’s response.

  The Birth of Tragedy—I’m not sure that I really understood this difficult book the first time around, since it demanded a far better education than I possessed. The paradox of Nietzsche, one of the best-read Europeans of his day who celebrated, however, not erudition but life itself, could not be self-evident and readily comprehensible to someone who belonged, unfortunately, to one of the worst-educated generations in the modern history of this continent (in Western as well as Eastern Europe). I still don’t know if I really grasped the subtlety of Nietzsche’s vision of tragedy, that desperate yet joyful affirmation of our fragile human existence. I sensed, I guessed, I fairly vibrated while reading about tragedy’s Dionysian essence, and I’m sure I was taken with all things Apollonian. But I was put off by his jabs at Socrates. I liked and admired Socrates; I had a hard time believing that the decline of Greek and European culture began with him. I remember thinking, What colossal snobbery, to trace the beginnings of decadence back to Athens! But what wouldn’t I have forgiven this writer, whom I worshipped, to whom I ascribed superhuman powers and a titan’s intellect? I had to put the problem of Socrates to one side for the moment and concentrate on comprehending the master’s thought. Comprehending? I’m not entirely sure that this was my object; I read Nietzsche more for inspiration, for fortification, to fuel the flame. That’s how young, and sometimes not-so-young, poets read—greedily, egotistically. They’re concerned not so much with asking, “Is he right? Isn’t he misjudging, say, Socrates, Christianity?” as they are with receiving a charge of pure energy. This is all the more salient in Nietzsche’s case, since this “energesis” is contained and celebrated within the text itself, it is the nucleus of his thought and even his style.

  Such were the beginnings—sweet beginnings!—of my acquaintance with Nietzsche’s work. He wasn’t my only intellectual master back then, though. I don’t intend to bore the reader with a list of my early masters—I only want to stress that I wasn’t an unadulterated Nietzschean. But even though I didn’t keep faith completely, what I experienced was powerful enough to allow me to understand all those fervent readers of the mustachioed philosopher who, in the final years of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth, devoured his books as voraciously as if no other writer, philosopher, artist had previously existed, as if the prophet, the intellectual lawgiver they had awaited for so long had suddenly appeared out of nowhere!

  The more distant I grew from my first youth, the more I experienced the sensation that Nietzsche was aging alongside me. I got to know his later works—Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, the bombastic Zarathustra, the insufferable, unpardonably narcissistic Ecce Homo, the grim, posthumously published Will to Power. This was a different Nietzsche, no longer nimble and buoyant as he had been on his journey’s outset (buoyant, although conscious at the same time of numerous abysses). The artist’s voice grew fainter while the tone of a cult’s founder, of a perverse moralist obsessed with settling scores with Christianity, socialism, morality, grew ever stronger. The very concept of life changes its character later on. In the early work it is surrounded by a nimbus of poetic suggestiveness and thus bears a strong resemblance to the gay, creative spark that ignites the paper palaces of smug scholars and the codes of Victorian morality. In the later work it becomes, literally, a hammer turned against his enemies, a weighty tool (for all his ceaseless hymns to lightness) that is monotonously, obsessively overused. He did not escape the dangers of solitude that he had pointed out in his youthful essay on “Schopenhauer as Educator”—a certain embitterment, a callousness. Indeed, they took a far more extreme form than is usual even for such solitary souls. Nietzsche was also apparently afflicted by an ominous predilection common to certain nineteenth-century thinkers (and later to their disciples and heirs in the following century). This was a shared tendency toward drawing large-scale ideological conclusions lacking any sense of humor or any doubt in their own prophetic perspicacity.

  I began to see Nietzsche’s followers more and more clearly, that legion of disciples intoxicated by their reading of “the recluse from Sils-Maria.” The recluse from Sils-Maria now walked engulfed in an enormous retinue: d’Annunzio carried his umbrella, André Gide gazed at him with adoration, Camus took notes, Hamsun worked to remember the master’s every word, Malraux talked nonstop, D. H. Lawrence praised the charms of sex, Thomas Mann wavered between him and Schopenhauer, Robert Musil wore his finest suit, Rilke pondered a young lady passing by. What could be more farcical than this crowd of great people surrounding an even greater person. At times it might even seem that V. I. Lenin, that advocate of violent means, the man of action par excellence, who wasn’t bothered in the slightest by the laws of this or that morality, didn’t emerge from the wooden house in Symbirsk so much as from the stained and well-thumbed pages of Nietzsche’s late
work. (This hypothesis is not entirely far-fetched, since Lenin’s manifesto of the will to power, What Is to Be Done? dates back to 1902, when Nietzsche mania had seized all of Europe.) It’s true that the crowd surrounding the now-mythic Nietzsche was composed largely of the most gifted writers and thinkers in Europe (and not only Europe). In Poland there was Stanislaw Brzozowski, later Iwaszkiewicz, Gombrowicz, and others. It’s difficult to imagine a country in which Nietzscheanism didn’t leave its mark, didn’t trouble the intellectual atmosphere. It wasn’t just Nietzsche, of course; sober textbooks remind us of the neo-Romantic crisis, the desperate search for a new balance between the overwhelming predominance of science, with its narrow notion of rationalism, and the needs of a metaphysical nature that had been radically modified due to transformations in the traditional structure of religious beliefs. For all that, though, even knowing how much someone like Nietzsche may have been—unconsciously, half consciously—awaited and longed for, we’ll probably never cease to be fascinated by the scale of that adoration, the expanse of that influence, the fervor of that faith.

  All these writers and thinkers surrounding a Friedrich Nietzsche already frozen into legend and gazing at him with adoration: this spectacle is, as I’ve said, slightly comical, although it doesn’t lack a certain old-fashioned charm today. As for me, my Nietzsche, the Nietzche of my first readings, gave way to another thinker. I rebelled against the existence of so many other Nietzscheans; it was almost jealousy, the kind of jealousy you experience when your friend makes friends not just with you but with a hundred other friends, two hundred acquaintances, three hundred fans. Moreover, I began to read critical works about Nietzsche, with their divisions into periods, their enumeration of influences, their occasionally petty preoccupation with details. At first I refused to accept them. I went into shock upon witnessing an inspired work falling beneath the blows of mere judicious, reasonable arguments, like a great tree perishing beneath the axes—or chain saws—of simple lumberjacks. For one thing is beyond doubt: this is inspired work, written in dazzlement, in rapture, and not the product of calculation, consideration, as is the case with British analytic philosophy. Obviously this is why poets and novelists were the first to do justice to a brilliant writer who may have had his stylistic faults, linked to his obsessive motifs—how many times, for example, does he repeat the word “proud”? But even these flaws stemmed from inspiration. This philosopher with his inspired pen is a genuine holiday for writers and perhaps also a genuine tribulation to philosophers.