{"id":73473,"date":"2019-09-26T17:05:05","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T15:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=73473"},"modified":"2019-09-21T09:43:22","modified_gmt":"2019-09-21T07:43:22","slug":"26-05-40","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=73473","title":{"rendered":"Ishmael in Warsaw: Daniel Aaron\u2019s Polish Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Ishmael in Warsaw: Daniel Aaron\u2019s Polish Journal<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Christoph Irmscher<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Daniel Aaron in his Warsaw University office, 1962\u201363. (Collection of Christoph Irmscher)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Our guest post today comes from\u00a0Christoph Irmscher<\/a><\/span>, professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, editor of the Library of America volume\u00a0John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/em>, and author of the biography\u00a0Max Eastman: A Life<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Yale University Press, 2017).<\/span><\/p>\n

Irmscher is the literary executor for\u00a0Daniel Aaron<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/span>(1912\u20132016), the pioneering scholar of American studies who was the founding president and a life trustee of Library of America. Irmscher recently established a\u00a0website<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0dedicated to preserving Aaron\u2019s legacy; in the following essay, he shares his findings from transcribing the journal Aaron kept as a Fulbright Ambassador to Poland in 1962 and 1963. The journal is a major document of the work Aaron did as a cultural ambassador at the height of the Cold War, and the pages in question build to Aaron\u2019s eventual realization that \u201ccountries taking different paths, marching to the rhythm of different drummers, can still be in shouting distance of one another, and the shouts don\u2019t have to be insulting.\u201d A longer and somewhat different version of this essay will appear in\u00a0Ideas Crossing the Atlantic<\/em>, to be published next year by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In 1961, Daniel Aaron published Writers on the Left, a study of recent American writers who had flirted with the idea of communism\u2014a somewhat scandalous project in a nation that had barely emerged from the red\u2013baiting of the 1950s.<\/span><\/p>\n

To achieve what he had been asked to provide\u2014as complete a picture of the \u201cvisitable past,\u201d in Henry James\u2019s phrase, as he could manage\u2014Aaron had to invent his own method. He later said that his inspiration had been John Dos Passos\u2019s trilogy U.S.A. Alternating between \u201cgroup narratives\u201d (narratives about organizations, magazines, and institutions, as well as explanations of literary history) and stories about individuals or \u201crepresentative men,\u201d he created a rich, complex tapestry of the 1930s and \u201940s. Almost inevitably, he submerged his own point of view under the opinions of his subjects, and his political position remained murky. As Aaron admitted later, Dos Passos\u2019s \u201cCamera Eye\u201d was largely absent from his book.<\/span><\/p>\n

But maybe it is helpful to think of Writers on the Left as a peculiarly Melvillean book rather than a piece of intellectual synthesis and to see Aaron as inspired by Melville\u2019s Ishmael, who made the transition from \u201cschoolmaster to a sailor\u201d when he joined the crew of the Pequod. Writers on the Left was Aaron\u2019s version of F. O. Matthiessen\u2019s American Renaissance, but his gathering of exemplary writers was retrospective, not forward-looking. Instead of magisterially defining a proudly American canon for future readers, all he had been able to do was \u201coffer a few clues to the mysteries of the recent past,\u201d as Aaron wrote in the 1964 paperback edition: a humble attempt to preserve, for readers in the 1960s, what was already slipping away.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1962, Aaron formally reversed the passage from schoolmaster to sailor when he went to Poland as a Fulbright Lecturer, his first extended experience of living in a communist country. He had felt the proximity of Russia during the year he spent teaching in Finland in 1951\u201352, when a secretary at the Soviet embassy had unsuccessfully tried to recruit him as a spy. American embassy officials were stunned by his na\u00efvet\u00e9. When Aaron arrived in Poland in August 1962, he had just turned fifty and considered himself wiser. In the spiral-bound notebook journal he kept, he made a promise to himself early on: he wanted to be an ideal visitor, not \u201cThe Suspicious \u2018Don\u2019t Take Me In\u2019-American,\u201d who \u201carrives with firm convictions about Marxist political theory, totalitarianism, clich\u00e9s about the Soviet bloc\u2014with the view that socialism or soviet communism is the same wherever it takes over and that Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, East Germany etc. are basically the same.\u201d This type of person would come to Poland with his head swirling with stories of \u201cPolish perfidy,\u201d bugged hotel rooms, tapped phones, and beautiful female spies ready to pounce. Clad in the impermeable armor of their \u201crealism,\u201d fancying themselves \u201chard-boiled political sophisticates,\u201d the Don\u2019t-Take-Me-In Americans would insulate themselves against too close contact with actual people. By contrast, the ideal visitor opens his eyes and ears, letting the impressions flow, no matter the political system: \u201cthe mirage of socialism, or capitalism, or Catholicism should never blot out the realities of people.\u201d He would truly get to know the country (January 6, 1963).<\/span><\/p>\n

Clearly, Aaron\u2019s research for Writers on the Left had prepared him for his visit: If the interviews he had conducted for the book were any indication, there was no one-size-fits-all approach to communism. It helped that he had come by himself; his wife Janet Summers Aaron, who almost three decades earlier had been among the first group of American students to visit the USSR, wouldn\u2019t join him until December. From the beginning of his stay, Aaron went out of his way to meet people, at parties, in his apartment building on Aleje Jerozolimskie in the center of Warsaw, on trains, and in the streets. He assiduously worked on his command of Polish, beginning, after a while, to write out the dates in his journal in Polish. Teaching American literature at Warsaw University was not an easy gig, to be sure: Aaron found his students little prepared or motivated for actual study and their linguistic skills deficient (November 18, 1962).<\/span><\/p>\n

Determined to live up to his notion of the ideal visitor, Aaron quickly noticed that Poles tended to be friendly but reserved when they met foreigners. It is interesting to see how, even at a rather early stage in his visit, he sought to come up with reasons for that invisible wall\u2014not a \u201chigh wall,\u201d he insisted\u2014that separated him from them. For Aaron wanted to understand Polish reserve from both his perspective and that of the Poles themselves. Imagining what a Pole might say to a foreigner, he became, at least in his imagination, that Polish citizen: \u201cThe Pole easily looks across and smiles at the westerner. You see, he seems to be saying, it is possibly wiser for both of us to be circumspect. Not, mind you, because we fear anything in particular.\u201d The great watershed in recent Polish history, the uprising of 1956 that had swept First Secretary W\u0142adys\u0142aw Gomulka into power, had loosened the rigid hold of communism on the country but had only increased worries of more hidden threats. \u201cIf we seem too friendly, too eager,\u201d Aaron\u2019s imaginary interlocutor continues, \u201cwell, this might be misinterpreted so let\u2019s see each other on official occasions\u2014and then perhaps\u2014when we\u2019ve had the chance to size each other up\u2014we can meet more informally. I know you\u2019re not the kind of American who will return home and write an article about your Polish experiences which will compromise the Poles who\u2014out of mistaken trust\u2014were indiscreet and said unwise things\u2014but then, you see, we can be sure. And there is still so much at stake for us here\u201d (December 11, 1962).<\/span><\/p>\n

Daniel Aaron at Warsaw University, 1962\u201363. (Collection of Christoph Irmscher)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In his journal, Aaron is very good at evoking the damp, dismal days of fall in Warsaw, the moist climate of worry that seeps in through one\u2019s pores in a city where even the American ambassador has to escape to a forest preserve outside the city limits when he wants to have a conversation without the authorities listening in (September 29, 1962). Aaron was expecting to be conscious of his Americanness during the year. What he wasn\u2019t ready for was the extent to which the Poles constantly reminded him of his Jewishness. The anti-Semitism of even the intellectuals he encountered troubled him and put considerable pressure on his resolve to be the ideal visitor. It didn\u2019t make much of a difference to him that his interlocutors seemed focused on Polish Jews, as if they still resented the latter group\u2019s return to Poland after the war. When it came to Jews, definitions of Polishness were restrictive, he learned, in a way definitions of Americanness tended not to be. Polish Jews could never pretend to speak for, or represent, Poland. Even a liberal, sophisticated friend confided in him that the Jews, in his opinion, contaminated the Polish gene pool (February 17, 1963).<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet, overall, Aaron was deeply impressed by the fundamental kindness of the people he met. The Poles, he decided, made lousy communists; their nation, composed of fierce individualists, was as unsuited to communism as one could only imagine. In a letter to the German\u2013born Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann he copied into his journal, Aaron wrote that he was beginning to think that Poland wasn\u2019t \u201ca nation at all, but a sprawling collectivity of idiosyncratic individuals held together by some sort of political mystique. If ever a nation was unfitted\u2014temperamentally, emotionally, politically\u2014for socialism, this is it.\u201d It was hilarious to think that the Soviets had hoped to transform this country: \u201cOn top of all this assorted human material sits the Party apparatus attempting to make all this imprecision precise. . . . ideology triumphs magnificently over common sense.\u201d The spectacle was, Aaron concluded, \u201cat once poignant, comic, and disturbing. Quixotism is more significant than Marxism\u201d (January 20, 1963).<\/span><\/p>\n

Polish individualism suited Aaron just fine, and he began to settle into a routine that involved meeting his classes and spending his Sunday mornings drinking weak tea or bad coffee at the Dom Turisty on Novy Swiat, a grubby hotel right across from the statue of Copernicus that always smelled of varnish: \u201cI check my coat, enter the empty kawiarnia [coffeehouse], and write for several hours in my journal,\u201d he told Kaufmann. The \u201cmercurial Poles\u201d remained a subject of infinite interest to him. The flip side of their individualism was the daily scramble for survival, since there was never enough of anything, the rudeness it brought out in normally kind people, \u201cthe timidity with which an aspirant for anything from a room to a passport peeps into an office and prepares himself for the insolent reception he is very likely to get\u201d (January 20, 1963).<\/span><\/p>\n

But even as the communist bureaucracy and the sufferings especially of writers and professors under socialism led Aaron to question his own lingering socialist sympathies, he remained more perturbed by the way his own country sought to demoralize the Poles by constantly advertising the American \u201ctestament of plenty.\u201d In his journal, Aaron was withering about the attempts of American cultural diplomacy\u2014what he called the \u201cAmerican \u2018Mission\u2019\u201d\u2014to convert the Poles away from communism by baiting them with an exaggerated version of the West, the \u201cAmerica of glittering perspectives.\u201d So that they may win minds, Americans \u201cmust tell the truth about ourselves.\u201d If the United States saw fit to give loans to developing countries, why not offer loans to \u201cunderdeveloped minds\u201d (March 23, 1963)? Americans should limit their goals to what is realizable, and Aaron did his own by beginning to smuggle books, on subjects not officially sanctioned, into the library of the Polish Academy of Science.<\/span><\/p>\n

recommended by: Leon Rozenbaum<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nThe longer Aaron stayed in Poland, the more clearly he realized that he could never be \u201cthe perfect interpreter of the New Poland.\u201d His Polish remained halting, and \u201cAmerican conventions\u201d were too deeply ingrained in him to get full access to the truth about the Poles. But he still felt that he was ahead of other American observers before him, such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Daniel Bell, or Lionel Trilling, and he dismissed the numerous other members of the \u201cbattalion of one or two week junketeers who see and hear just enough to be completely . . . misleading when they write about Eastern Europe\u201d (March 4, 1963). Just a few years earlier, in his introduction to an anthology of writings from Poland, Trilling had announced there was a possibility that Polish intellectuals, given their strong anti-Russian bias, might eventually succeed in getting \u201ca considerable measure of freedom to be established in Poland under national communism.\u201d Galbraith had lectured in Poland four years earlier, and subsequently published the journal he had kept, in which he praised Polish laundry services (his shirts, he said, came back \u201ccleaner than the Harvard Coop ever got them\u201d) and lamented the shabbiness of Polish life. His verdict was similar to Trilling\u2019s: it was impossible to reconcile the \u201cvery high state of intellectual life\u201d in Poland with the low level of economic life. The result was paralysis, and a country full of high-achieving thinkers yearning to go west: \u201cA \u2018Ford Fellowship\u2019 is the new Jerusalem.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Aaron\u2019s assessment of his own ability to understand the Poles was free of such pontificatory certitude. Rather than taking the high road, he had been \u201csniff[ing] around the edges\u201d and thus getting short looks behind \u201cthe flamboyant Polish fa\u00e7ade.\u201d The only thing he knew for certain was that, with Poland, there was nothing to be certain about: \u201cI know Party people and innovators and peasants and counts. And I have acquired a number of \u2018informants\u2019 whose explanations as to what is really going on are impressively contradictory.\u201d Aaron became obsessed with finding the \u201cpin of truth\u201d hidden in the \u201chaystack of error\u201d that everyone knew communism was (March 4, 1963). That separated him from someone like Galbraith, who, with impressive self-deprecation, once described the attitude of Americans to socialism as akin to their attitude to sex: \u201cThere is deep fascination, a desire to look, and if possible to touch, but no desire to become involved.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Daniel Aaron in Sopot, Poland, in 1963. (Houghton Library)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

There is very little that is unrestrainedly personal in Aaron\u2019s Polish journal. His wife\u2019s arrival is mentioned briefly, as is her impatience with the deprivations of life during the Polish winter: lack of hot water, delays in the delivery of coal and therefore no reliable heat, and empty shelves in the grocery stores. But several photographs in Aaron\u2019s papers reveal the degree to which he at least did become immersed in Polish life, allowing the schoolmaster to be replaced by the sailor. A series of such pictures was taken, according to the inscriptions on the back, in the summer of 1963 on the white sand beaches of Sopot, near Gdansk. They are obviously private in nature: in some of them, Aaron is sleeping, while in others he\u2019s half turned toward the camera, reluctant to pose yet not. These are different images from the one [above, top] in which a smiling Aaron is posing, fully suited, in in his office at Warsaw University, the very model of the affable American visiting professor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Aaron\u2019s Polish journal builds toward a conclusion at which the photographs from Sopot only hint. Throughout the year, Aaron takes infinite pleasure in the people he meets, treating them with a kind of quiet delight at the fact of their existence. The scenes recounted in Aaron\u2019s diary have the wondrous normality of a Kafka novel, in which one expects strange things to happen as part of the ordinary daily business of getting on with one\u2019s life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Early one morning, having just moved into his nondescript apartment in Warsaw, Aaron is woken up by the unfamiliar sound of a bell. He describes what happened next: \u201cI leaped out of bed, conditioned fire-horse that I am, and went first to the telephone. Buzz. Then to the door\u2014which I opened as far as the guard chain would allow.\u201d Out in the dim corridor he spies the figure of a woman, who immediately wants to know if \u201cAnn somebody\u201d lived there. A cascade of Polish words follows. \u201cI explained I was newly arrived, that I was American, that I understood no Polish.\u201d But this does not deter the visitor. More volleys of Polish words follow: \u201cAt last, good naturedly, she begged my pardon and retired into the cold and fog\u2014after ringing some other doorbells. I looked at the clock when I climbed back into bed. It was 5:30.\u201d Not a word of complaint, condemnation, or anger. Instead, Aaron accepts this woman\u2019s presence outside his door and her subsequent disappearance into the Warsaw fog as if these were the most natural things in the world (October 6\u20137, 1962).<\/span><\/p>\n

Once his Polish has gotten better, Aaron finds out more about the men and women he encounters. But he always leaves the basic mystery of their lives intact, conveying a sense of wonder at how such people manage to carry on at all. Take the two men he meets at a bar in Rado\u015b\u0107, a suburb of Warsaw. One of the men has \u201ca ravaged Hawthorne face\u201d: stubbly, unshaven, the thin, refined skull crossed by a livid scar. Dressed in discarded company clothes, he has a long glass of vodka before him. His companion\u2014big moustache, heavy leather overcoat\u2014is \u201csolicitous, quiet, worried.\u201d With sad, weepy eyes, \u201che gloomily surveys his outrageous friend, whose mutters blossom with shouts against the militia, the Bolsheviks, Russia.\u201d Every other sentence uttered by Hawthorne Face is a curse, addressed to no one in particular. \u201cI must teach these militia with their Russian uniforms righteousness,\u201d he shouts. Aaron finds out from the man\u2019s droopy-eyed friend that he is visiting from Gdansk and that he suffered a head injury during the 1956 turmoil. In his former life, he had been a professor, a Doctor of Philosophy, a \u201ckind and wonderful man,\u201d though that might not be so evident now. As Aaron, horrified that someone like himself, an academic, could end up imprisoned in such irrationality, turns toward him, the ex-professor utters another curse and then, abruptly, gets up: \u201cHis cap on at a rakish angle, he fills his canteen with vodka, gives me a beautiful smile\u2014and leaves with his solicitous friend.\u201d There is so much in that beautiful smile, given to Aaron that night by a man everyone else would have seen as just another angry drunk: recognition of their shared humanity, of the fact that dignity, after most everything is gone, may lie in the way you put on your hat (March 17, 1963).<\/span><\/p>\n

Aaron left Poland at the end of June 1963. He spent a few days lecturing in Germany, which proved to be an anticlimax. Living in Poland had increased his sense of his own Jewishness, but in an odd way, Aaron\u2019s out-of-placeness was not a problem in a nation where everyone seemed somehow ill at ease. Being a Jew in Germany was different, and Aaron\u2019s journal records his surprise at the powerful reaction he had to seeing the former perpetrators of the Holocaust live so exceedingly well. Munich was, he observed on July 4, \u201cfull of food, cars, well-dressed people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Daniel Aaron at an exhibition of Polish posters at Smith College in 1964. (Houghton Library)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

What the Poles, shivering in their ill-fitting clothes, displayed only too readily, Germans tucked away under layers of \u201cgood quality clothes,\u201d glass and stone and gleaming metal: \u201cunderneath . . . the emptiness and anxiety.\u201d The \u201cthick mantle of prosperity\u201d collectively worn by the German nation made him sad rather than angry, and it didn\u2019t help that he felt that his lectures were \u201cunwanted and probably unnecessary.\u201d The Poles had sloughed off their responsibility for genocide, too, but their depressed manner of living, for Aaron, had somehow become a way of doing penance for what happened. Post\u20131956 Poland was a state of mind, rather than country; its chaotic unloveliness had given Aaron an uncanny sense of home that the gleaming facades of Munich could not. Nor, for that matter, could his own countrymen: \u201cHeidelberg is full of yelling Americans\u2014and a disagreeable place it is\u201d (July 4, 1963).<\/span><\/p>\n

For two thirds of a century Aaron was a cunning observer of the twists and turns of history. But he wasn\u2019t an ungracious one as he kept imagining the possibility of a united world in which people talk to one another across national or geographical boundaries. In a \u201cSelf-Interview,\u201d delivered as a talk at Smith College after his return from Poland, when the last remnants of his socialist faith were gone, Aaron declared: \u201cCountries taking different paths, marching to the rhythms of different drummers, can still be in shouting distance of one another, and the shouts don\u2019t have to be insulting.\u201d Let us think, he says, of ideas not as weapons but as bridges, as points of integration and reconciliation. This was as much an admonishment directed at his own government as it was an assessment of Polish politics.<\/span><\/p>\n

For decades afterwards, Aaron modeled the \u201carticulate dialogue\u201d he recommended in his post-Poland lecture. His small kitchen in Cambridge, with its malfunctioning stove and the torn red-and-white checkered tablecloth, became a meeting place for people from all walks of life, academics and non-academics, activists and conservatives, clutching mugs of strong instant coffee or the occasional glass of whiskey. Talking gave Aaron pleasure. But above all, he liked to listen. His kitchen at Farwell Place around the corner from Harvard Square was a kind of indoor agora and remained so pretty much until the day he died, on April 30, 2016, just a few months shy of his 104th birthday.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Notes<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Quotations in this essay are taken from Daniel Aaron\u2019s Polish Journal, 1962-63, now at Houghton Library, Harvard University. Aaron alternates between English and Polish in dating his entries; for the sake of consistency and accessibility I have translated the Polish instances.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

For more on Aaron\u2019s lecturing abroad, see his own account in\u00a0The Americanist\u00a0(University of Michigan Press, 2007). Unpublished material cited in this essay, including the photographs, are from the Daniel Aaron Papers, Houghton Library, MS Am 2951, and appears by permission of the estate of Daniel Aaron (Christoph Irmscher, literary executor). The photograph of Aaron in his Warsaw office is from the collection of Christoph Irmscher.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Ishmael in Warsaw: Daniel Aaron\u2019s Polish Journal Christoph Irmscher Daniel Aaron in his Warsaw University office, 1962\u201363. (Collection of Christoph Irmscher) Our guest post today comes from\u00a0Christoph Irmscher, professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, editor of the Library of America volume\u00a0John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings, and author of the biography\u00a0Max Eastman: A Life\u00a0(Yale […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73473"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73488,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73473\/revisions\/73488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}