Free Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag Page A

about the end of an autonomous state (not restored until after World War I), to the collapse of the Soviet-style regime in 1989.
    Such countries—such histories—make it hard for their writers ever completely to secede from the collective anguish. Here is the testimony of another great writer living in a newer nation condemned to nonstop dread, A. B. Yehoshua:

    You are insistently summoned to solidarity, summoned from within yourself rather than by an external compulsion, because you live from
one newscast to the next, and it becomes a solidarity that is technical, automatic from the standpoint of its emotional reaction, because by now you are completely built to react that way and live in tension. Your emotional reactions to any piece of news about an Israeli casualty, a plane shot down, are predetermined. Hence the lack of solitude, the inability to be alone in the spiritual sense and to arrive at a life of intellectual creativity.

    Yehoshua’s terms are identical with those of Zagajewski, whose first prose book in English is a collection of six pieces published in the early 1980s called Solidarity, Solitude . Solitude erodes solidarity; solidarity corrupts solitude.
    The solitude of a Polish writer is always inflected by a sense of the community formed by the literature itself. Milosz, in his own great defense of poetry, the address that he delivered at the Jagiellonian University in 1989 entitled “With Polish Poetry Against the World,” pays homage to Polish poetry for having protected him “from sterile despair in emigration,” recalling that “in solitude too difficult and painful to recommend to anyone” there was always “the sense of duty toward my predecessors and successors.” For Milosz, born in 1911, a Polish writer may never escape being responsible to others. By this rule, the stellar counterexample of Witold Gombrowicz—in his fiction, in his legendarily egocentric, truculent Diary , in his brazen polemic “Against Poetry”—offers evidence, convulsive evidence, of the authority of idealism in Polish literature. History is present even by its absence, Milosz observes in a late book of prose, Milosz’s ABC’s ; and the cult of altruism and high-mindedness flourishes, if perversely, in Gombrowicz’s denial of responsibility to anything beyond the self’s anarchic clamor, his ingenious harangues on behalf of the menial, the immature, the low-minded.
    Squeezed right, every life can be construed as embodying exemplary experiences and historical momentousness. Even Gombrowicz could not help but see his life as exemplary, making something didactic—a rebuke to his origins—out of his gentry childhood, his precocious literary notoriety, his fateful, irrevocable emigration. And a writer whose love of literature still entailed, unresentfully, so much piety toward
old masters, such eagerness to feed on the magnificent traditions on offer from the past, could hardly help seeing his life—at least his early circumstances—as some kind of representative destiny.
    Soon after Zagajewski’s birth in October 1945 in the medieval Polish city of Lwów, his family was uprooted in the great displacements (and redrawings of maps) that followed the Yalta agreements of the Three Old Men, which put Lwów in the hands of the Soviet Union; and the poet grew up in the formerly German, now Polish, town of Gliwice, thirty miles from Auschwitz. In Two Cities , his second prose book translated into English, Zagajewski writes:

    I spent my childhood in an ugly industrial city; I was brought there when I was barely four months old, and then for many years afterward
    I was told about the extraordinarily beautiful city that my family had to leave.

    The family mythology of an expulsion from paradise may have made him feel, he says, forever homeless. It also seems, on the evidence of his writing, to have made him an expert lover of cities—“beautiful, bewitching Kraków” above all, for which he left unredeemable