A Defense of Ardor Read online

  Why did Weil’s ascetism so torment Czapski? Why did her breathless quest to fuse with God bother him, a painter to whom, moreover, the fates had granted a very long life and who could never accept suicide as a cure for despair? Why did it disrupt the pleasure he took in work, painting, thinking, life? Why did he require such anguish, why did he need this friend-enemy? He had other friend-enemies apart from Weil. Stanislaw Brzozowski was one of these, particularly in his tragic, impassioned Memoirs, where the consumptive philosopher elaborates his ideas and beliefs, as well as his dreams of a longer, calmer life given over to regular, disciplined intellectual labors. It’s almost as if Czapski were punishing himself for his own long life, his struggles in two different disciplines; he had occasional stretches of less taxing labor, he wasn’t hungry or sick, so he tortured himself by way of these two firebrands and their premature deaths. This clearly doesn’t get to the heart of Czapski’s fascination with Weil’s writings, though. I’ll come back to this later—although I can’t promise a complete, exhaustive answer even then. But I’m beginning to realize that I’ve spent too long on abstract problems belonging to the history of ideas, on which I’m far from expert.

  I’d rather describe how Czapski smiled, how he spoke, how he welcomed his guests, the passion of his conversations. I’d rather show both Czapski and Jozef—there was no fundamental division, but there were subtle distinctions. You could discover Czapski through his work, his books and paintings, and through the story of his life. Czapski’s canvases and texts live on quietly in galleries, museums, private collections, and libraries, so quietly in fact that they don’t even seem to realize that their creator has died. Jozef’s humanity, on the other hand, has vanished from the earth’s surface forever. His six-and-a-half-foot silhouette, slightly hunched, is gone.

  Since he couldn’t express his entire self in his work after all. No one can find complete expression in art (only the Christian idea of immortality hypothesizes absolute self-expression). Even so Czapski was exceptionally fortunate, since he could articulate his vision both in art, which records a way of seeing, and in writing, where he managed to communicate his ideas and moods and to preserve his distinctive patterns of speech. More than this—he lived intensively and well. I’m not sure I’d say that he had a “strong personality.” A personality can be confining. A personality is what we exhibit to others, an instrument by which we exert pressure on them, conquer them, colonize them. Moreover, people with unusually strong personalities often can’t tolerate solitude, since their personalities subsume their inner life. Czapski didn’t have a strong personality, he had a strong humanity. If he had been invited to dinner with ten other people, he certainly wouldn’t have stood out, dominated the evening. He was never the great wit, the person you remembered afterward as the party’s star—apart from his great height and heartfelt smile. He came through more powerfully in one-on-one contact, where you don’t just trot out prefabricated formulas, but other, subtler things come into play—the smile, the way of speaking, even the hesitations. Everyone who knew him recognized his great charm. It took Anna Akhmatova only one evening with Czapski in the winter of 1942, in Tashkent—where she and a host of other Russian writers had been evacuated from Leningrad and Moscow—to fall in love with him. She wrote a poem about their meeting, and not long ago I heard that Brodsky, after seeing a photograph of Czapski for the first time, commented: “Now I know why Anna Andreevna fell in love with him; he had a White Guard charm.”

  So he didn’t have a strong personality in the sense of commanding attention in a social setting. Now and then he’d even withdraw from the conversation completely; there are famous instances—in the later, Maisons-Laffitte period—when he’d send dull visitors packing, those dreary guests who came to gape at “the great Czapski.” The passion for sketching and jotting thoughts in the notebooks he always carried with him was another form of social reserve. But he was not at all like Musil’s “man without qualities.” He didn’t lack qualities (I’m trying to describe them now!), but they emerged quietly. They resembled a canvas stretched taut on a huge hoop and thus nearly transparent. The hoop was made up of Czapski’s vast, ambitious plans, projects, and labors, which constantly reenergized his inner life, leaving little space for pure psyche.

  I regret not having recorded more of what Jozef said. Now, looking over my meager notes, what strikes me most is the intellectual tension in which he lived, the constant sense of the “world’s terror” I’ve already mentioned. Once I remember praising an essay written by one of our acquaintances in a conversation with Jozef. His reaction: “Yes, but you don’t feel that the text was written facing the abyss.” Another time we were both at the house of a mutual friend, a famous writer. Jozef listened for a while to our discussion on the subject of the Zeitgeist and its relentless influence on art and thought, then exploded: “I don’t understand a word, what’s all this about the Zeitgeist, what counts is staying true to your own vision, end discussion!” Of course he was right. Sometimes the idea of the world’s cruelty nearly paralyzed him; once he said, “You know, instead of ‘We shall gather at the river,’ they should just sing ‘we’re devouring each other.’” For all that, though, he was serene and sometimes even happy. In anyone else, this might have been taken for hypocrisy: look at this cheerful old man in his tidy room, well fed, with friends, and he pretends to be put out by others’ troubles. He shouts that the world is cruel while pouring sugar in his coffee; he’s not rich, but he doesn’t want for anything: Mrs. Janina makes his dinner, Jula Jurys talks about intelligent books, Jacek Krawczyk looks on with admiration, young painters from Poznan or Krakow pay tribute. But this wasn’t a farce, Jozef wasn’t putting on a show, he didn’t know how; his most conspicuous feature was the exceptional simplicity that precludes any form of theatricality. Absolute simplicity, the absence of any kind of diplomacy or reservatio mentalis. At most, you could charge him—if you didn’t like him—with the occasional moment of exaltation, or at times, the easy tear. But this, too, grew from his simplicity, his assumption that we’re all equals; even the student from Warsaw who’d come to Maisons-Laffitte to meet Czapski might have something vital, decisive to say, thus he, too, must be given a careful hearing, his tale must be experienced and comprehended.

  As a thinking person, Czapski belonged to that rare breed of artists who—though they battle, and believe, and doubt, and care passionately—at life’s end still don’t know anything for certain. Unlike the representatives of the far larger species of those who know, or think they know, and ardently preach their one, two, three, or four Ideas, this breed lives with the feeling, bitter at times, but also not free of a certain pleasant melancholy, that the mystery enveloping the most important things—time, love, evil, beauty, transcendence—is still, now that they are old and tired, just as impenetrable as it was in the days of their tempestuous, enthusiastic youth. Knowing nothing is not a passive state of sated ignorance; it’s not a state at all, but an atmosphere, a climate of thought. I can’t imagine any of the representatives of this small clan ever simply coming out and saying: “I don’t know.” (Perhaps they leave that to their biographers, scholars, and friends, if they even care, which I doubt.) To say “I don’t know” would be like transferring to a different tribe, the tribe of acknowledged ideas. Thus they—is there even really a plural here? did Czapski have spiritual doubles?—aren’t eager to formulate a credo. They’re preoccupied with the search itself up to the end. Such was Czapski, unsure for long years of his own gifts as a painter and a writer. (We shouldn’t forget that in both his journals and essays he criticized each component of his identity—“count,” “Pole,” “Catholic,” even “painter” and “writer”—and remained a free man, searching for truth and artistic expression to the end.) He dreamed of expressing the “world’s terror,” and in truth his late landscapes, painted as he was nearing his ninetieth year, reach the point when anxiety or dread can’t be separated from serenity, even happiness. His journals bear traces of deep emot
ion, of doubt and despair alongside moments of revelation, joy, the pleasure derived from regular work and reading.

  The English literary tradition contains a principle formulated by John Keats in one of his splendid letters, the principle of negative capability. Keats thought the poet should live in eternal uncertainty; he shouldn’t articulate worldviews, take positions, but rather open himself to various convictions without relinquishing his inner freedom. I suspect that Czapski would not have been at odds with the young author of “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”

  Czapski, who doesn’t “know anything”—what does that mean? A person who read everything, poetry and essays, who could recite Polish, Russian, and German poems from memory, graced with a boundless curiosity about the world and people, an artist who studied painting almost until the end (and quoted Hokusai, who planned to reach his artistic peak at the age of 120)—what does it mean to say he didn’t know? I think that the heart of his not-knowing was essentially religious: very strong faith and very strong doubt alongside a complete inability to stay fixed in one single, stable metaphysical conviction. Czapski’s religious notes are full of motion—his belief ebbs and flows by turns. He was so profoundly antidogmatic that he didn’t even trust himself. He suspected that faith was taking the easy way. But he knew that disbelief could be easy too. On his bedside table he kept the books of Simone Weil and Stanislaw Brzozowski, two mad writers who died young and who “knew.” He required the constant presence of thinkers who thought they’d found the truth, since he himself didn’t know. But his “I don’t know” was passionate, incandescent. It wasn’t the “I don’t know” of the sleepy athlete the teacher points to in the classroom, or the “I don’t know” of an Italian cabinet minister suspected of embezzlement and feigning innocence, or even the “I don’t know” of some Eastern sage absorbed in Asiatic oblivion. (This was also because all fatalism and resignation were foreign to Czapski; he ran all over Paris with his packages for friends!) He required Simone Weil’s constant presence so as to warm his “I don’t know” at the great flame of her fanatical “I know.” As a result, his “I don’t know” also caught a spark, became far more powerful and moving than the hundreds of other “I knows” I’ve encountered. This wasn’t an “I don’t know” arising from amnesia, laziness, depression, negativity, agnosticism. This “I don’t know” was positive, inspired, intelligent. It inheres in the very heart of Czapski’s work; it pulses in his marvelous journals, in his essays; it vivified the conversations he held with friends and with people he scarcely knew, whom he’d just met. It also—in a different way—prompted his painting. Perhaps it was because he remained obedient to his restive “I don’t know” that he was able to paint until advanced old age, always dissatisfied with his progress, always humble before the great masters, open to new modalities and angles of vision in an age when others by and large merely graciously replicate themselves, erecting their own monuments in self-satisfied autobiographies. Czapski’s “I don’t know” was the soul of his spiritual life, his long pilgrimage. At times he seemed to seek out that “I don’t know” in others as well: in Maine de Biran, whose inner integrity he admired; in Rozanov, whose chimerically shifting opinions he struggled to understand in good faith, although he couldn’t imitate him; in Amiel and Cézanne. His “I don’t know” helped him to distance himself from authorities he no longer trusted—just as he rejected the sectarian Tolstoyanism of his early youth, and as he ceased to obey the aesthetic dictums of the Polish postimpressionists. This burning “I don’t know” was the motor driving his quest and also proved to be—although this wasn’t the result of any conscious psychotechnic operation—a guarantor of eternal youth and boundless enthusiasm. At the same time, though—I’ll mention this once more, since it’s both essential and exceedingly rare—this steadfast “I don’t know” was accompanied by an equally decisive ethical “I do know.” Not knowing about abstractions never involved hesitating for a moment when it came to helping the suffering, bearing witness to historical truth, opposing Stalinism or Nazism. His incorruptible “I don’t know” never led to anything like indifference to the visible world. Czapski shared nothing with the mystic who withdraws from history, like those Hindu noblemen motionlessly poised over a chessman while the English army conquered their country (I saw this in the film The Chess Players). Perhaps he had his mystical moments, but he was a mystic who returned, who never made the decision to retreat for good. He searched for the missing (murdered) Polish officers when necessary. He bore witness—in the 1949 trial of David Rousset—to the reality of Soviet concentration camps in the face of those fanatical Parisian communists who murmured that he must be one of Goebbels’s agents. His “I don’t know” didn’t concern obvious things, injustice, pain, political prevarications. But in the realm of endless debates, in the sphere of thought and philosophical conclusions, he maintained a child’s eternal freedom. And a childlike sense of humor; he was drawn to suffering, but he also loved to laugh. A religious temperament doesn’t kill a sense of humor—just the opposite, it shapes, develops it.

  He had many friends, who loved and admired him unreservedly to the end. He was in essence, though, a solitary man. He was my friend and master.

  The master of my not-knowing. And what is not-knowing but thought?

  1993

  5 Beginning to Remember

  Beginning to remember! While the person we know and admire is still alive—even if he lives far off—remembering remains peaceful, lazy, and pointillist. The memory doesn’t yet strive for a synthetic, unified vision. It calmly drifts from spot to spot; it skips from one episode to another like children playing hopscotch. We say: But do you remember the trip to Meaux? Do you remember Christmas Eve in Berlin, Zbigniew’s bass voice singing carols? Do you remember the visit to the Hôpital Saint-Louis? Do you remember the bouquet he brought you that time?

  After the person’s death, everything changes. The memory grows sober and settles down to its great labor. This time its goal is synthesis. It longs to catch and combine all the scraps and pieces it recalls, along with the thoughts they inspired, into a single portrait. In the first weeks and months after the loss of a great friend the memory repeats: it’s still too soon, I still can’t see, let’s wait a bit. But then the first anniversary of the death draws near, time swims past like an Olympic freestyler and suddenly you have to hurry, suddenly it seems that no task is more pressing. And at the same time it turns out that we’re dealing with an unfinished project, with a process of remembering that can’t be seen through to its conclusion. Of course, you can write down some recollections, reach the words “the end,” send the text off to the printer—only to realize a few days later that you’ve forgotten something, left something out. Often the most important thing! And so on, and so on.

  It also turns out that we have at least two kinds of memory. One is intelligent, educated, not only able but eager to synthesize; this is the memory that sets forth large outlines, rational theses, vivid colors. But there’s also her humbler sister, the memory of little snapshots, fleeting instants, a single-use camera producing atoms of recollection, which are not only unsuitable for enlargement and standardization, but even take pride in their absolutely idiomatic nature. And it is this memory—small, quick, acute—that refuses death, will not agree to alter completely its system for archiving recollections. And thanks to this, it retains more life, more freshness in its flashes. It keeps repeating: remember, remember, remember … and after each “remember” another slide from its vast repository lights up. It’s useless, though, to request a specific moment, a specific day. This memory is as capricious as a librarian who thinks her paycheck is a disgrace and takes her revenge on innocent supplicants by pulling from the files only those photos that strike her fancy.

  The mystery that every powerful personality conceals doesn’t open up before us simply because the person who bore that mystery is no longer living. We saw the greatness of the person who died during his lifetime. We also saw his weaknesses and did
n’t dare to link them with his virtues, or perhaps we didn’t know how. Now, when the biographical parentheses contain an implacable second date, we try to understand both one and the other.

  He was a great poet! It’s a pity that Gombrowicz spoiled the flavor of this simple phrase, which is a nobly succinct declaration of the highest esteem. He was a great poet, and as is always the case with greatness, analysis can add nothing to this laconic formula (one may write analytically, and at great length, about the worst graphomaniac). Powerful emotion, intellectual pleasure, a feel for the rare timbre of the voice that speaks to us—only these have something to add.

  Critics have searched Herbert’s often flawless books and essays for the guiding principle of his poetry: neoclassicism, the fugitive from utopia, the poet of fidelity, the voice of suffering. His work is strangely resistant to critical investigations; it particularly resists efforts to uncover a single central point. It may be that certain poetic imaginations do in fact stand upon a single principle that can’t be divided up, while others build instead on multiplicity, relations, complications. And it seems to me that Herbert’s poetic world belongs to this second family—even though, paradoxically, the same strong voice is audible throughout.

  In Herbert, we hear irony, humor, and that humanist serenitas that so rarely graces twentieth-century literature—but there’s also despair and mourning. Formally he’s a modern poet—I mean modern in the sense of European modernism—but his work is imbued with love of both the Polish and European traditions, with love and knowledge.