This passage immediately horns the reader into Miłosz’s shoes. How to stand on a balcony while the next suburb is burning, and its children being shot in the streets? I know what I like to think I would have done, but Miłosz was in semi-hiding himself, and hid and supported Jewish friends, so I’m not about to judge him – especially when he would judge himself so harshly later.

Miłosz had established a reputation as a poet before the war, but that terrible event seems to me the turning axis of this book, and of his later writing life. He was to return to it – and numerous other dark nights from those years – in his poems obsessively.

‘Campo dei Fiori’ was one of the earliest, written that same year, and named after the square in Rome in which Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in front of an indifferent crowd several hundred years before:

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the flying-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were soaring
high in the cloudless sky.

So were the ashes of burning Jews, there and all over Europe – surrounded by indifference. Miłosz goes on to foreground the murdered rather than leaving them in the background, as if offering an argument against, say, Auden’s famous ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’:

Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo dei Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet’s word.

Well, maybe. But does this poem achieve anything more than the simple prose passage? Miłosz looks himself, at least, more squarely in the eye in ‘Dedication’, another poem from that annus horribilis:

You whom I could not save
Listen to me
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree ...

... What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies.

Which leaves us where all such discussions about human suffering and poetry seem to beach themselves: wrestling with Theodor Adorno’s (misquoted) dictum that ‘After Auschwitz, poetry is impossible’. Pablo Neruda (hardly a poet of ‘simple speech’ himself) put it another way: ‘the blood of the children flowed in the streets ... like the blood of the children’. Miłosz’s slightly younger contemporary Tadeusz Różewicz was to take this anti-metaphor program to its conclusion more rigorously than any poet I can think of, and as a result his ‘anti-poetry’ is simply and powerfully translatable. As is Miłosz’s prose – besides The Captive Mind, his autobiographical and critical writings translate lucidly. But it is much more difficult for a non-Polish speaker to properly assess his worth as a poet, given his continued reliance on the ‘wizardry of words’.

Czesław Miłosz, 1942I first came across Miłosz in 1970, not as a poet but as the translator of another of his contemporaries, Zbigniew Herbert, whose Penguin Selected Poems blew my mind, as we tended to say back then. On the strength of that book, I bought another Miłosz-edited Penguin – Postwar Polish Poetry (1965) – and discovered he was a poet too. It was another mind-blowing book, filled with a poetry so hard-earnt, so forged in the fiercest possible furnace – the Polish experience during World War II – that it made the preoccupations of Anglo-American poets of the same generation seem trivial. There was one odd editorial decision, at least in retrospect: a single poem only by Wisława Szymborska, who would also go on to win the Nobel Prize. Her poem, singular, was accompanied by an editorial note that I am sure Miłosz later regretted: ‘There are many women among the postwar Polish poets. Szymborska, I feel, best exemplifies their merits and defects. She is witty, daring, resourceful, but too fond of conceits.’

Like another larger-than-life East European poet, Joseph Brodsky, Miłosz was never short of an opinion, which got him into trouble on all sides, even more so when those opinions changed. During the war years, he was too left-wing cosmopolitan for the Polish nationalists (and also perhaps too pro-Semitic) and either too Catholic or too humanist for the communists. Which is not a bad place to be: it’s important to pick deserving enemies.

His life (1911–2004) is a micro-history of the twentieth century, at least in its European manifestations: a story of repeated wartime dislocations, of homecomings and exiles, of shifting political allegiances, of acts of principled courage alternating with dubious moral accommodations. His restless wanderings – geographic, linguistic, political, intellectual, emotional – began as a four-year-old refugee fleeing with his mother before the advancing German Army during World War I. At one stage, they found themselves as far into Russia as the shores of the Volga. Born in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, Miłosz was fluent as a boy in Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian. ‘Language is the only homeland,’ he would later claim; on the other hand, he missed his physical homeland terribly in his years of exile. His rural childhood before World War I was idyllic – a lost paradise that shines its light throughout his later writings – as were the years afterwards, if interrupted in 1920 by a new war between Bolshevik Russia and the newly independent Polish state. This time the family fled westward, back into Lithuania.

Much of this idealised childhood is described brilliantly in his memoir, Native Realm (1959), even if some aspects of that antebellum paradise make for poignant reading in the light of later events. We know only too well what happened to those picturesque Jewish villages that supplied artisans and tailors and craftshops for their neighbours, and musicians for their Catholic weddings.

Miłosz spent a year in Paris before World War II but was soon shuttling back and forth between Russian and German armies again, this time with his wife, Janka. As a rare Polish species – a left-wing Catholic – he came perilously close to being executed by both sides.

A proper review of the thick tapestry of this book’s events, and of its morally complex protagonist, would be another book – and probably not much smaller. Since I can’t hope to compass that in a review, I will limit myself to that wartime crucible in which his best work was forged, and the immediate communist aftermath. A year after the ghetto rising came the Warsaw Uprising proper: the Polish Home Army attacking the occupying Germans while the Red Army waited on the other side of the Vistula to pick up the pieces. Miłosz refused to join the Uprising, in part because he thought it was futile, in part because he was suspicious of its nationalism – but also because of another passage in the book that stopped me dead in my tracks. The occasion was Miłosz explaining to a resistance fighter friend that ‘he had no intention of fighting, because it was essential for him to survive the war: his duty was to write, not fight. The possible loss of his life would be of no use, but his writing was very important to his country.’

Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz , Venice, 1967

The friend, not surprisingly, thought this dishonourable. Me too, instinctively, but again it is too easy to pass judgement from the safety of an armchair. Throw yourself under a German (or Russian) tank and achieve little, or survive and bear witness? Miłosz had seen many friends – and poets – die in futile resistance, including Krzysztof Baczyński, ‘the hope of Polish poetry’. He also continued to hide, and support, Jewish families during those years. But the ghosts and the guilt would haunt him, despite his best efforts at exorcism. From ‘Dedication’, the last quatrain: ‘They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds / To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. / I put this book here for you, who once lived / So that you should visit us no more.’

There are ghosts aplenty in his best-known poem from those years. ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’ uses a favourite trope of anti-Semitism: the Jew as a furtive subterranean creature, in this case a mole that is burrowing through the graveyard, counting and enumerating the corpses, including the Christian narrator’s.

I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole
He has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch
Who has sat much in the light of candles
Reading the great book of the species.

What will I tell him, a Jew of the New Testament,
Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.

This is a poem that stands with Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ as one of the most powerful written about the Holocaust. Like Celan’s, it is no anti-poem, but makes use of the full range of poetic special effects. Most of these war poems were published in his stunning 1945 collection, Rescue, which also contains a sequence of simple, beautiful lyrics about his childhood, as if in ironic counterpoint. Szymborska first heard Miłosz read in Kraków in this period. ‘A great poet’ she called him, a far more generous assessment of his talent than his of hers, and ‘like an angry cherub with a distinguished voice.’

The end of the war brought new problems, new dilemmas. In the chaos of ‘liberated’ Kraków, filled with refugees, there were fresh pogroms against Jews by returning Poles. Miłosz and Janka shared an abandoned apartment with a Jewish couple, on the empty bookshelves of which he placed a single book, perhaps ceremonially: Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Well, life was frugal – if anything but simple, politically.

‘The purest of nations when judged by a flash of lightning, / But thoughtless and sly in everyday toil,’ he wrote in ‘A Nation’, and he was fully aware of his own slynesses. Publicly loyal to the new Marxist government, he was more cynical in private. ‘In no circumstances would I join the Polish Workers’ Party,’ he wrote, ‘although I shared their hostility and paranoia about the right; so in fact, I did not have to lie.’

Except by omission.

Things got even more complicated when he joined the Polish diplomatic corps, serving as cultural attaché at the Washington embassy. More startling passages here: he reported, controversially, back to Warsaw on the views of various Polish émigrés in the United States. When he finally defected to the West – in Paris – he was not universally welcomed in émigré circles. The ghosts continued to haunt him through his years of exile in America, even as late as 1968, when he had a major clash with his close friend Zbigniew Herbert. Herbert, like Różewicz, had been an active member of the Polish Underground, and revisited those years, vehemently, after a few too many drinks. Their relationship never fully recovered, although Herbert wrote a memorable apology to Miłosz some months later: ‘Whether you like it or not, I will haunt you with my strange love until the end of my life and then some time afterwards ... You must understand there are certain things I cannot communicate to you, because of the lump in my throat.’

Carol and Czesław Miłosz, 2002

My strange love of Polish poetry still haunts me. I felt personally (and ridiculously) affronted when Miłosz won the Nobel Prize in 1980. If it was Poland’s ‘turn’, surely it should have gone to ‘my’ horse in the race, Herbert. This big, complex biography has challenged that, mostly by making me take down his big 1988 Collected Poems and read through it again with fresh eyes. It has been so long it might as well have been for the first time. The book now seems almost an embarrassment of riches, despite having to survive translation into the different music of English. And despite Miłosz’s own postwar minimalist tendencies, the larger body of his work makes the plain-speaking of a Różewicz, say, now seem overly puritanical.

Another thing I noticed for the first time: his poetry – like his prose – is always at war with itself. Heraclitus is a name that crops up often in Miłosz’s writings, and the Greek philosopher would seem as much a guiding light as his Catholic faith. Two well-known Heraclitean precepts spring to mind for this wandering, quarrelling man: that flux is the fundamental property of the universe, and that the nature of reasoning is always oppositional. Especially self-oppositional. Forget Marx and Hegel; Miłosz’s dialectics were pre-Socratic. Robert Frost’s epitaph would suit him well: he ‘had a lover’s quarrel with life’, alternating between celebrating its beauties, and remembering its horrors.

Under a linden tree, as before, daylight
Quivered on a goose quill dipped in ink.
Books were still governed by the old rule
Born of the belief that visible beauty
Is a little mirror for beauty of being

Thus begins a poem from the ‘The Spirit of History’ section, only to finish with survivors running through war-torn landscape: ‘Till the end of their days all of them / Carried the memory of their cowardice.’

On the subject of arresting passages, one other from the years of the Warsaw Uprising caught my eye: ‘Not just family and friends of the Turowiczes found refuge on their estate, but also people who were in hiding: partisans, Jews, and even an Australian paratrooper.’ Who that paratrooper was, and what he was doing on the Eastern front, sandwiched between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, I have no idea. Miłosz, also in hiding on that estate, survived, but here he is, years later, quarrelling with his wartime notion that his duty was to write not fight:

Do you still say to yourself: non omnis moriar?
Oh, yes, not all of me shall die, there will remain
An item in the fourteenth volume of an encyclopaedia
Next to a hundred Millers and Mickey Mouse.