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Czeslaw Milosz, 1911–2004
At Berkeley I encountered a few truly great people, thus learning the existence and importance of greatness. Each of these people was difficult. The poet Czeslaw Milosz, possibly the greatest of them all, was no exception.
Wherever he was, he never truly fit. A Polish icon now, because of his Nobel Prize, he was born in Lithuania, a country which (during the Soviet occupation) he could not visit for 52 years. As a poet of the Warsaw resistance, he already saw beyond public over-simplifications; and he wrote war poetry suffused by transcendence:
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
This doubleness between the visible and invisible developed in his mature poetry. Estranged from the land and language of his birth, he became a poet of the globe, annihilating boundaries, and struggling to recuperate through fragments of scattered experience everywhere the memories of a sacredness he first encountered as a child.
After World War Two, trying to remain loyal to a country that was not truly his, he became for a few years a diplomat in Poland’s postwar Communist government. In 1951 he defected to Paris, abandoning a nation where his poetry was banned for decades, but in fact read reverently by every good writer I knew when I was a diplomat there in 1959–61.
He was no more comfortable in France, where his first famous book, The Captive Mind, was attacked as fashionable Orwellianism by the intellectual left.
So he came to Berkeley in 1960, famous but isolated. I arrived the next year intent on meeting him. Many in the local Polish community advised fervently against it, describing Milosz’s years in the postwar government as a treason that could never be exculpated.
When I met him in 1961 or 1962 he lived in a fine house off Grizzly Peak, but with few friends outside the Slavic department. The next five years I met regularly with him to translate Polish poetry—the entire Polish canon, including Zbigniew Herbert and himself.
These were perhaps the most stimulating evenings of my life. I had never before met such critical acuity combined with such passionate erudition. Coming from a region where frontiers slipped east and west, and where Poland could vanish from the map for a century, Milosz was engaged primarily with the fate of language.
As he wrote later, “My faithful language,/ I have served you./ Every night I have set before you little bowls with color /…. You were my homeland because the other one had gone missing.” He saw the poet, in his services to language, as fulfilling a socio-historic role, maintaining contact with the sacred which words, untended, would otherwise obscure.
On my side I hoped for an English poetry not numbed by cliches like “Poetry makes nothing happen” or “A poem should not mean, but be.” I felt a door opening in my mind to a different tradition, where poets, by default, are repositories of a people’s hopes. (Such as Milosz’s brief poem to the martyrs of Solidarity—“Do not feel safe. The poet remembers….”—inscribed on a monument in Gdansk.)
There was an irony here that luckily took time to unfold. Down on the campus I was soon caught up in the historical eddies after the FSM, above all speaking out against the Vietnam War. Obviously, Milosz’s hostility to Communism was irreconcilable with my desire then for coexistence with Moscow.
A North American, I did not yet fully appreciate, as he did, the “fragility of those things we call civilization or culture,” and the “high cost” of our “growing consciousness of global interdependence.”
He started exploring the grandeur of Jeffers, a poetry of withdrawal, if not contempt for history. His distaste for pro-Soviet utopias had led him, by a kind of inverted Cartesian dialectic, to share Jeffers’s rejection of secular humanism:
I hear you saying that liberation is possible
and that Socratic wisdom
is identical with your guru’s.
No, Raja, I must start from what I am.
I am those monsters which visit my dreams
and reveal to me my hidden essence.
If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever
that man is a healthy creature.
Later I realized his rejection of eastern and western pieties about human goodness was grounded in a considered affirmative Catholic faith, but a faith which encompassed what he called “the twentieth century’s simple touchstone of reality: physical pain.”
It’s beyond my understanding.
How could you create such a world,
Alien to the human heart, pitiless,
In which monsters copulate, and death
Is the numb guardian of time?
For two or three years the political differences between us did not seem to matter. Our long and sometimes quite drunken evenings above the fog were resulting in new artefacts and new aporias, beyond the previous limits of either Polish or English. And certainly (I thought) beyond politics.
Then in 1967 Milosz attended a rally where I spoke on the same platform as Noam Chomsky. At our next meeting he said stiffly that he could understand my remarks, but he could not forgive Chomsky’s (“the kind of intellectual who weakened Weimar”). In those days the U.S.–Weimar analogy still seemed far-fetched to me; and I brashly said so. After that we barely saw each other for years. I was, frankly, broken hearted.
My despair resulted in a long poem to him (it’s in Crossing Borders). Someone gave it to him, and to my delight he phoned to set up a reconciliatory meeting. We talked for three hours, with a new candor about our differences.
I last saw him at a memorial dinner for our mutual friend Denise Levertov. He was in his late eighties, and his wife Carol sat me next to his one good ear. He proceeded to deconstruct the complexities of Polish Catholicism with undiminished discrimination and ardor. And I was able to tell him how much I admired and loved and had been changed by him.
When he died in Krakow there was almost a fracas at his funeral. Nationalist Catholics, who had never trusted him, threatened to block the procession, partly because Milosz had signed a statement supporting gay rights. It took a telegram from Pope John Paul to calm matters.
Americans will turn more and more to Milosz, including those Americans who now share his pain at being governed by strangers with little intelligence and even less compassion. There is a new timeliness to his studies of how brilliant minds can adjust themselves to the intolerable. And some will study too how he managed to balance withdrawal with engagement, in his conviction that “The passionless cannot change history.”
—Remembered by Peter Dale Scott,
professor emeritus of English at Berkeley and author of
Listening to the Candle and Crossing Borders,
which both remember Milosz
Pete Cutino
Pete Cutino, the legendary Cal water polo coach, died unexpectedly September 20 at his home in Monterey, apparently of heart failure. He was 71. He led Cal teams to eight national championships and coached five Olympians, including current Cal coach Kirk Everist ’89. “For me, it’s as close to losing a father as you can get,” Everist said.
I first met Pete in the pool. I was playing for the Olympic Club, attending architecture school at Cal, and coaching the Bears’ freshman water polo team. Pete played for Cal Poly, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1967 and a master’s in 1970. He was a collegiate all-conference selection in water polo three times.
At Oxnard High School, his first coaching job, he racked up a 64-8 record as swim coach, claiming five county championships, while his water polo teams went 80-12. Then, in 1963, Cal hired him as head coach of the water polo team. He stayed 26 years, until 1989, and built the most successful college program in the nation. His career record at Cal, 519-172-10, included eight NCAA crowns; his last team, in 1988, won a school record 33 games. In addition to the five Olympians, Pete coached 68 All-Americans, and six Pac-10 and NCAA Players of the Year. He also served as head coach of the U.S. national team (1972–76) and the U.S. Olympic team in 1976. Four times he was named NCAA and Pac-10 Coach of the Year; in 1999, he was awarded the highest honor for an aquatics coach, the Master Coach Award.
Pete was a fierce competitor. He was known for pacing poolside during games, intimidating officials and opponents. Once, in the 1950s, when I refereed a game he played in, I made a call that probably cost his team the game. Pete, who was four inches taller and 70 pounds heavier than I was, climbed out of the pool and approached me, dripping wet. “If you touch me, you’ll never play water polo again,” I warned him. “I’m not going to touch you, just going to kill you,” he said. Instead, we became friends for the next 50 years.
Despite his intensity, Pete had a great sense of humor. Bob Gaughran, my teammate at the Olympic Club and a great coach himself, tells this story: “In 1976, when he was our U.S. national team coach and I was national chairman, we were in Rome for a couple of days, and Pete flew to Sicily to visit his father’s birthplace and relatives. When he returned, I asked him how the visit went. He said effluent ran in the ditch by the road, and the women—who were mostly very old widows and couldn’t bathe on a regular basis—were intent on kissing him. So I asked him what he was going to tell his dad when he got home. He said, ‘I’m going to kiss him on the mouth and thank him for leaving Sicily!’”
Lois, his wife of 50 years; his children, Peter ’84, Paul, and Anna; and his many players, fellow coaches, and friends have lost a father and friend. But his legend and name will live on. Pete led by example, based on a deep set of values. The Pete Cutino Award, established by the San Francisco Olympic Club, will be awarded annually to the top female and male collegiate water polo players in the nation.
—Remembered by Jay Flood ’59,
an architect in Santa Monica who has designed
and managed construction of aquatic sites for
the Olympic games and for Cal
Joan Gruen
 A fundraiser in the Office of University Relations the past 16 years, Joan Gruen died October 22. Born in New York City, she graduated from Barnard College and spent 15 years as a real estate agent before joining University Relations in 1988 to raise funds for Class reunions. “Joan led dozens of Class campaigns,” said Lishelle Blakemore, director of annual programs. “Her wonderfully warm and engaging personality was an inspiration to her colleagues and to the many alumni she worked with over the years. She believed deeply in the mission of the University, and helped to raise more than $100 million to benefit the University’s academic programs.” Joan is survived by her husband of 45 years, Erich Gruen, a Berkeley professor of history and classics, and by their children and grandchildren. Donations for the Joan B. Gruen Fellowship Fund may be sent to University Relations, 2440 Bancroft Way, Berkeley 94720 or given online at givetocal.berkeley.edu.
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