lection

another beauty

15 september 2024

The late Adam Zagajewski's Another Beauty is about artistic creation and aesthetic experience under trying circumstances: the conjunction of youthful callowness and a government determined to repress all forms of joy.

The book was written from places of safety, looking back on that anguished youth. By 2000, when Another Beauty was published in Polish, the country was markedly freer, and Zagajewski himself was living in comfortable acclaim, commuting as only successful writers can between Houston and Paris. But he stresses:

Peace is a port we reach occasionally, sometimes for a long stay, but sooner or later we're always forced to leave, as if our ocean liner sailed beneath a dubious flag pursued by the mistrustful eyes of customs officers. (104)

Another Beauty isn't linear at all. Among its modes are: short set-piece narratives, descriptions, and character sketches; essays on aesthetics; aphorisms; diary notes (some of them so throwaway as to have no public significance); music criticism; and poetics. Zagajewski – best known as a poet – occasionally quotes poems by others, but never his own.

I was most taken with Zagajewski's various meditations on the course of intellectual careers under communism. I grew up in the U.S., fourteen years younger than Zagajewski. I took historically extreme conditions of free speech for granted. I have been able to teach, write, and publish my ideas on the internet without the slightest interference. I suppose I don't really expect an authoritarian regime to take over in America in the next four years, but the threat is no longer fanciful. How would I behave if I were suddenly silenced, stripped of my professorship, unable to post these book reviews?

I guess you'll never know, either way. But one can encounter such an experience in Zagajewski's memoirs of such a period. His thesis director Leszczynski in a green loden coat, stolidly making his way through a career devoid of interest; the superseded Szuman, unable to keep teaching, now a forgotten figure shambling upstairs with a meager bag of groceries; a careerist whom Zagajewski calls only "Professor U," making his way from one party-sanctioned success to another – later, after the fall of the Soviet empire, still an insolent egotist in retirement; Roman Ingarden, a genius too august for the party to silence, but also one they didn't have to, caught up as he was in the innocuous music of phenomena; Woroszylski, who reversed the usual course by being reactionary when young and increasingly a defiant spokesperson for free speech as he aged.

"The poet is a born centrist," writes Zagajewski (56). He must convey "an observation, a joy, a sorrow that is my own, and not my nation's" (191). Few on the left or the right have ever agreed. Poetry seems to many of its students just a more highly patterned prose, inseparable from rhetoric. Poetry that should not mean but be seems a bourgeois luxury, all the more so in the face of so much mendacious, dogmatic prose. But perhaps Zagajewski is right. Perhaps the only way to live in the face of repression is to embrace the passion of art and forget its meaning.

One of the oddest but most memorable passages in a book full of them is Zagajewski's extended "wool" metaphor (113-114). "Wool" in this segment of Another Beauty stands for the raw material of art, "from which our suits are made." Finished art (the "suits") becomes cultural history. But there is far more wool around than gets made into suits, the wool

of those who died too soon, of those whose lives didn't turn out, the wool of unwritten epics and symphonies, of unpainted pictures, of thoughts that never came to mind, the wool of a world in which fate worked differently.

Zagajewski conveys a sense of how close he came to being such a remnant; but also, a sense of how remnants are the fabric of the world.

Zagajewski, Adam. Another Beauty. [W cudzym pieknie, 2000.] Translated by Clare Cavanagh. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002. PG 7185 .A32W213

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