Quote of the Day (Lech Walesa, on ‘Polish Aspirations to Freedom’)

“I think that all nations of the world have the right to life in dignity. I believe that, sooner or later, the rights of individuals, of families, and of entire communities will be respected in every corner of the world. Respect for civic and human rights in Poland and for our national identity is in the best interest of all Europe. For, in the interest of Europe is a peaceful Poland, and the Polish aspirations to freedom will never be stifled. The dialogue in Poland is the only way to achieving internal peace and that is why it is also an indispensable element of peace in Europe.”—Former Polish President, union leader, and democracy icon Lech Walesa, “Nobel Peace Prize Address,” Dec. 11, 1983

Lech Walesa was born 75 years ago today in Popowo, Poland. The arc of his career—first leading the exhilarating battle for freedom in Eastern Europe, then increasingly marginalized in this region as it embraces the worst form of nationalism—is familiar but dismaying.

In 1980, Walesa sparked a series of strikes that won for Solidarity the right to represent workers. The free world cheered again as he endured house arrest and systematic harassment during Polish General Jaruzelski's imposition of martial law. Late in the decade, he proceeded from triumph to triumph, as Solidarity negotiated the right to free elections in Poland. A decade after the Gdansk strike, he became the first freely elected President of Poland. 

Unfortunately, Walesa was less adroit as President than as dissident and union leader. His alienation of former allies and inability to ensure a stable post-communist economy ensured a narrow defeat at the polls in his 1995 re-election bid—ironically enough, to a former communist functionary.

In the wake of that defeat, many believed that the freedoms Walesa had helped secure would survive in his homeland. But, while there has been no going back to Poland’s communist past, the nation has taken another problematic political turn, with the ruling nationalist Law and Justice Party supplanting liberal news anchors and talk-show hosts on state media with more congenial right-wing voices. At the same time, the new leadership also packed the Constitutional Court with five justices of their own liking and, particularly heinously, adopted a law (since modified) restricting public debate on the Holocaust.

Under the new regime, Walesa’s once-bright star has dimmed. He’s been forced to deny accusations that he served as a communist informer in the 1970s before he rose up the union ladder. More recently, he was pointedly excluded from any speaking role at recent anniversary celebrations of Solidarity. 

Poland is “now being destroyed,” Walesa explained to Bloomberg in discussing why, in his mid-70s, he felt compelled to step back into the political arena to monitor his country’s elections. His case illustrates how voters the world over, riven by socioeconomic discontent, might turn away from the liberal free-trade regime that preserved European collective security after WWII.

Flashback, February 1945: FDR—“Sick Man at Yalta”?

Sixty-five years ago this week, Joseph Stalin, who fiercely distrusted physicians, played host to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt because, he claimed, doctors had warned him that travel outside the U.S.S.R. would endanger his health. To accommodate his partner in the Grand Alliance against Hitler, an ailing FDR further endangered his own health by traveling 14,000 miles for a meeting at an old Russian spa on the Crimean coast.

For nearly half a century, any talk about the Yalta Conference had the potential to devolve into a shouting match between conservatives and liberals. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the corrosion of the Iron Curtain have taken the edge off of such ideologically charged confrontations, but questions still remain about this controversial conference meant to speed the end of World War II and prepare for the postwar world.

Stalin’s gambit in convincing the Americans and British to locate the summit on his home turf is an apt metaphor for two factors that shaped Yalta and the delayed Anglo-American reaction to it: the Soviet dictator’s deceit and the American President’s declining health.

The initial wave of euphoria from the conference—the belief that the “Big Three” would not only see the war against Germany through to its conclusion, but would cooperate in a postwar world of peace, justice and greater freedom for all the people of the world—dissipated as soon as it became apparent that Eastern Europe was falling into the Soviet sphere of influence.

The issue was still fiercely debated when I was in college, when one of my history professors discussed how the Yalta agreements became, to conservatives, a case of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, as one foreign tyranny holding Eastern Europe in its grasp (Hitler’s Germany) was soon superseded by another (Stalin’s Soviet Union). When two members of the American delegation, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, were accused of espionage for the Soviet Union, Yalta became shorthand for a “betrayal myth” of the right.

(A few years ago, in fact, George W. Bush created a stir when he said Yalta represented agreements that viewed “the freedom of small nations [as] somehow expendable.” By the end of his eight years in office, he might have wished more than once that historical ankle-biters had rendered him the kind of understanding he had summarily rejected for FDR.)

The motive for a sellout at Yalta was given oxygen by Major General Patrick J. Hurley, FDR’s ambassador to China. The diplomat, who learned belatedly from the State Department about secret concessions to the Soviet Union concerning China, told Congress in 1951 that FDR had been a “sick man at Yalta”—a leader with the best intentions, but unable to stand up to Stalin.

The conservative charge of betrayal at Yalta was a myth. The notion that we had “given up” Eastern Europe was mistaken, since the British and Americans did not possess an inch of its territory and were in no position to do so.

In playing out scenarios of alternative histories, a certain amount of “present-ism” sets in, a harsh judgment of actors based on our contemporary notions of morality and/or our knowledge of how events turned out. That is particularly unfair to Roosevelt and Churchill, who did not know how a key technological development--the atomic bomb, as yet untested--would change the endgame of the war.

None of this is to say, however, that the two did not make serious mistakes at Yalta. The only reason why these didn’t cause more harm was that the facts on the ground—the military situation—overwhelmed all other considerations, limiting their choices and culpability alike.

Stalin’s Advantages at Yalta

Stalin had a good hand going into Yalta, but he played his cards so skillfully that the Soviet Union emerged from the conference as the real co-superpower with the U.S., at the expense of Great Britain. Here are the factors why:

* Location of boots on the ground. The mid-December Battle of the Bulge threw off the American timetable for the final push into Germany. By contrast, two days after the conclusion of the conference, Budapest fell to the Soviets. Ten million Soviet soldiers were in Eastern Europe, a number growing daily. For FDR to insist that the Soviet Union leave Eastern Europe, giving up ground it had already gained, would have Americans to take up arms again after Hitler was defeated—a prospect that few were prepared to do.

* Allies out of their comfort zone. Churchill reportedly remarked, “If they had searched for a decent place to meet for ten years or more, they couldn't have found a worse place than Yalta." More pointedly, he referred to the site, containing the former summer mansion of the tsar, as “the Riviera of Hades,” surrounded as it was by wholesale destruction left over by the Nazis.

To get to this godforsaken place, FDR didn’t have Airforce One, with all the comforts of home, to escort him. Instead, he sailed, taking evasive action at points, in the dead of winter, for several days, to Malta, before being flown to the Crimean town of Saki. The last leg of his trip was a six-hour drive in a chilly car on a bumpy road along the Crimean countryside. Roosevelt’s daughter Anna wrote her husband about the “creepy-crawly creatures” that, despite efforts at delousing, still remained in the rooms of at least some American and British delegates. Stalin took his sweet time getting there, not arriving till 24 hours later, giving his guests enough time to become depressed by their surroundings.

* Round-the-clock intelligence about the American and British delegations. The “creepy-crawly creatures” that grossed out Anna Roosevelt Boettiger were not the only bugs at Yalta—others were of the electronic variety. It wasn’t enough that Alger Hiss (who actually attended the conference as part of the American group formulating the United Nations) and Harry Dexter White—both now widely believed to be spies—were feeding the Soviets a steady diet of human intelligence. No, Stalin was also benefiting from wiretapping throughout the American quarters.

Delegates assumed they were being spied on, but some occasionally forgot. Moreover, the electronic surveillance extended beyond what many delegates regarded as likely. FDR’s aides spoke bluntly to each other out in the open, little knowing that “Stalin’s Himmler,” Lavrenty Beria, had managed to secrete more electronic devices out there, too. Just how good it was can be seen in this astounding fact: by the time Stalin sat down to breakfast each day, the wiretapped sessions had not only been transcribed but translated overnight into Russian for his benefit.

* Divergence in goals between the U.S. and British. FDR was annoyed the prior fall when Churchill spoke privately to Stalin about their respective “spheres of influence” (e.g., 90% Russian influence in Hungary, an equivalent amount for Britain in Greece). At the same time, Churchill was peeved that FDR was treating him more as what, in modern terms, might be called a “wingman” rather than an equal partner with the Americans and Soviets.

FDR’s Rapid Deterioration

The state of FDR’s health can use extended discussion. How bad was he, anyway? Did he end up yielding more than he would have under normal circumstances?

Several years ago, at Hyde Park, I saw a display of the naval cape the President wore on this trip. (You can see it in the photo accompanying this post.) He wore it with a gray flannel dark blue suit underneath, and as many people have noted over the years, he looked dashing. But the main advantage, he knew from his years as assistant secretary of the navy in WWI, was that it kept him warm. He hoped for similar results as he sailed to meet Stalin and Churchill.

But the long, arduous journey to Yalta so tired FDR that he was sick within 48 hours of his arrival. His daughter shared with her husband the fears of the President’s doctors about his “ticker”—which, she explained in alarm, was worse than they had known to date. FDR’s blood pressure had risen so dangerously high that his doctors urged that he not work more than four hours a day. Yalta involved so many matters—and so many different disputes to arbitrate among the Allies—that relaxing was well-nigh impossible.

In the year before, in the midst of his reelection campaign, FDR’s doctors had become increasingly concerned about his health. He had never really bounced back from the attack of influenza he experienced at his earlier summit with Churchill and Stalin at Teheran. A year and a quarter later, matters were far worse.

A month ago, The New York Times science correspondent, Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, reviewed a new book on “F.D.R’s Deadly Secret”: a melanoma that spread to the brain, causing the tumor that took Roosevelt's life. Altman implies that some conclusions of the authors, Dr. Steven Lomazow and Eric Fettmann, are so speculative that they don’t survive close scrutiny.

But Altman also mentions another point, important from a historiographical point of view, that has been lost over the years: By the 1970s, FDR’s children, anxious to preserve his reputation, were pressing his cardiologist, Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, to state that the President’s declining health had not affected his mental state at Yalta.

It’s probably impossible at this point to prove definitively whether the President had a melanoma that affected him, because no autopsy or biopsy was performed and most of his medical records disappeared after his death from the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md.

Nobody is saying that FDR’s decline rendered him incapable of understanding the issues before him. But, as Michael Beschloss explains in his history of the war’s final days, The Conquerors, the breakdown of FDR’s health affected his managerial style in another important way:

“His approach to leadership was to play Cabinet members off against one another, hold a dozen conflicting ideas in his head at the same time, and to keep the mechanics of control firmly in his grasp. But with his energy and concentration waning, he no longer had the patience and command of detail that had once let him keep important policies from going off the rails and Cabinet members from exceeding the rules he envisaged for them.”

With a legion of advisers accompanying him to Yalta, that old juggler’s ability to keep multiple balls in the air at once—all without telling anyone else—was gone. FDR’s continuing resort to his old habit of secrecy (VP Harry Truman didn’t even know where the President had gone) had significant consequences this time, because after his death the question of what he did or didn’t intend was far murkier. He loved to tell listeners exactly what they wanted to hear, but illness and death deprived him of the power to direct action where he wanted.

One other aspect of this dissipating energy comes into play: When you’re not physically at your best, you’re less inclined to dispute, more inclined to cut disagreeable discussions short. FDR wouldn’t have been human if this didn’t come into play. Combine that with his well-founded belief in his personal charm, and it’s easy to see how his honey words might have been construed by Stalin in a completely different light.

What the West Achieved…And Didn’t

One of FDR’s primary objectives was inducing Stalin to join the Pacific theater of the war against Japan. (Until then, the U.S.S.R. had stayed neutral in that part of the worldwide conflict.)

The Battle of the Bulge, the Allied generals in the West felt, was Hitler’s last gasp, and it was only a matter of time before Germany fell. But they expected the projected invasion of Japan to involve one million casualties.

Stalin agreed to join this front at last, within three months of Germany’s surrender, provided the Soviets were ceded the southern portion of the Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, and the rights to Manchurian Ports of Dairen and Port Arthur.. For the Allies, all things considered, the price didn’t seem steep.

But some came to see it as unnecessary by the end of August 1945, by which time Japan had surrendered. The capitulation, following so quickly on the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as Stalin’s declaration of war on the imperial empire, have led historians to argue ever since about which factor forced Japan to ask for peace.

In any case, whatever credit might have accrued to FDR and Churchill because of Soviet participation in the war dissipated.

But it was Stalin’s land-grab in Eastern Europe that rankled the most. The Soviet leader insisted on a friendly government in Poland, claiming that it had become a corridor for German invasions in the last two wars.

Typical of his style, FDR tried to smooth over any differences. He agreed with Stalin that there should not be a government “unfriendly” to the U.S.S.R. in Poland, but at the same time he and Churchill pushed for free elections.

In the end, both sides appeared to have received what they wanted: FDR and Churchill, assurances of free, democratic elections in all territory freed from the Nazis; Stalin, a pledge to include Communists in the future national government of Poland. But it was all a chimera.

The problem was that, in Lublin, Stalin already had a “stooge government” waiting to take over. That group and the Polish government-in-exile, in London, refused to cooperate with each other.

FDR’s hopes for Polish elections within a few months of the agreement, he realized before his death, were doomed. By the time Stalin permitted them to be held, it was two years later, by which time they were hopelessly rigged in favor of the Lublin group.

Churchill was somewhat blunter than FDR about what would happen, even before the summit, telling his personal secretary: “Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevized, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland, either.”

Perhaps because he had placed greater hope in his ability to charm Stalin, FDR felt far more keenly disappointed by this failure. Only a month and a half later, he was telling Anna Rosenberg, a longtime New York politico whom he’d entrusted to study manpower issues among Allied forces the prior year in Europe: “Averell [Harriman] is right. We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.”

As FDR’s comment indicates, Yalta marked the end of illusions, but it also meant the beginning of myths. One was perpetrated by the left: that it was only when the more hard-line Harry Truman assumed the Presidency in the wake of FDR’s death that the Cold War really began. The other came from the right: that FDR and Churchill gave away the fruits of what the British leader called, on a different occasion, “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

The level of scrutiny accorded Presidential candidates can be ridiculous at times, but it has had one salutary effect: No matter how well or not FDR performed at Yalta, it is unlikely that we’ll ever have another situation in which a dying occupant of the Oval Office engages in such momentous diplomacy with another head of state.

This Day in Diplomatic History (Nazis, Soviets Conclude Nonaggression Pact)

August 23, 1939—In an act brazenly cynical even by totalitarian standards, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed an agreement forswearing military action against each other.

The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact removed the last obstacle in the way of Adolf Hitler invading Poland and starting World War II. At the same time, both he and Joseph Stalin agreed, in secret protocols not officially revealed until 50 years later, on spheres of influence in Eastern Europe.

The two dictators, in effect, set about carving up most of Continental Europe between them.

The stunning move required ideological somersaults of almost Olympian proportions from Hitler, who, more than a decade previously, in Mein Kampf, had called for the dissolution of “Russia and her vassal border states”; Stalin, who, only four years before, had pushed the organization of international Communist parties known as the Comintern to forge broad antifascist coalitions in the Popular Front; and American Communists, who, having seen Stalin as the only Western leader unreservedly committed to containing Hitler, now found themselves forced to toe a new line enforced by the Kremlin.

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin never met. Instead, these two men, bent openly on destroying each other for years, deputized their principal foreign ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and V.M. Molotov (here pictured with Stalin in the middle), to ink the agreements.

Anthony Read and David Fisher’s revealing history, The Deadly Embrace (1987), offers many dramatic details concerning the motives and maneuvers behind the pact.

Hitler pressed hard to have an agreement in place before his planned September 1 invasion of Poland, even going so far as to send Stalin a personal letter on August 20. The German dictator later called the following 24 hours the most agonizing of his life, with his doctors waiting anxiously in case something happened.

When he finally received the phone call that Stalin had agreed to have Ribbentrop fly to Moscow, Hitler cried out jubilantly, “I have the world in my pocket!”

It certainly must have seemed that way. Once again, Hitler’s remarkable skill in outguessing opponents—in gambling that they would not be able to mount a defense against his most outrageous maneuver—served him well. A non-aggression pact with the U.S.S.R. would allow him to achieve several purposes:

* assure him that a German thrust against the West, unlike in WWI, would not have to be countered on an Eastern front;

* convince naysayers among the German high command—including Luftwaffe head Herman Goering—that the military would not face a protracted conflict;

* unnerve the Western powers, who could no longer count on the Soviet Union as a counterweight to the Nazis on the Continent.

What did Stalin hope to gain from the agreement? Certainly, the pact would allow him a free hand not just in carving up Poland with Hitler, but also in bringing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to heel.

But more might have been involved. Two weeks before Hitler and Stalin startled the world, the Soviet dictator had sent representatives to a meeting in which officials from France and Great Britain had exchanged military information to show their level of preparedness should war break out with the Nazis.

Before leaving, a British representative had been told to triple any estimate he offered about his country’s force levels: it would be discounted by a third, anyway. When he did as he was told, he was astonished to find his Soviet opposite number startled—not at the thought that the higher number was too high, but that it was too low.

Stalin confided to Nikita Khruschchev that the Soviet military force was in no condition to take on the now-well-oiled Nazi machine. Learning that the force levels of his would-be allies were in a state as parlous as his own, if not more so, could not have been reassuring.

The fact that the dictators concluded the agreement didn’t mean that all suddenly became well between them. In addition to Ribbentrop, Hitler sent, as his personal emissary to Stalin, an old acquaintance, Heinrich Hoffmann, who was instructed to take special photographs, “which sometimes give a much clearer clue to a man’s character than all the reports of some silly fathead in the Foreign Ministry!”

What Hitler had in mind: the shape and size of Stalin’s earlobes—details, the race-obsessed Fuehrer believed, that would indicate whether the Soviet leader possessed Jewish blood.

The well-known antipathy of the two leaders for each other provided all the cover they needed to move ahead with their plans in something close to broad daylight. U.S. intelligence, tipped off by a spy, warned Britain’s Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax—as far as they could without revealing their source—that he should prepare himself for a dramatic turn in relations between the two countries.

Halifax not only refused to believe it, but saw no reason to delay or even shorten his planned hunting trip in late August. That incident serves as a handy symbol for Britain’s willful state of illusion on the brink of war.

All of Europe would pay dearly for their leaders’ gamesmanship and lack of foresight.

The agreement caused unbelievable consternation in the West. It was savagely disillusioning to idealistic students who saw the Soviet Union as the only credible force against Hitler. In the early 1980s, one of my history professors at Columbia University recalled how the pact had led the scales dropping from his eyes in how he viewed the Communist Party.

In the Anti-Nazi League, one of Hollywood’s favorite political organizations of the period, the day after the pact was a disaster, a staff member, Bonnie Clair Smith, remembered, according to Nancy Lynn Schwartz’ The Hollywood Writers’ Wars. “The phones didn’t stop, and telegrams of withdrawal poured in. I don’t even think the Daily Worker came out that day.”

Yet there still remained some who were so committed to the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise that they sought any excuse to explain away the astonishing event. One was the screenwriter Maurice Rapf, who,in his memoir Back Lot: Growing Up With the Movies, recounted his self-justification: “How did I accept the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 which led to the Nazi invasion of Poland and the start of World War II? (I had a hard time with this but became convinced that Stalin was just buying time to prepare for the Nazi Invasion of the Soviet Union, which, in fact, was what Churchill and his European allies had wanted all along.)

Ideological U-turns remain the order of the day concerning the nonaggression act in Russia to this day. The current line being pedaled by Vladimir Putin is that the agreement—resulting from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s desire to direct Soviet territorial designs to the East—entitled Russia to the “near abroad” Soviet republics, and that these Baltic states acquiesced in their takeover.

Seventy years after the event, the brazenness of dictators continues.

This Day in Literary History (Joseph Conrad Lands in England)

June 18, 1878—Just months from involvement with gunrunning for Spanish rebels, steep gambling debts, and a suicide attempt, 20-year-old Polish sailor Jozef Teodor Konrad Naiecz Korzeniowski stepped off a British freighter at the seaport of Lowestoft, knowing only six words of English. By the time of his death 46 years later, Joseph Conrad had produced a host of novels and short stories, many sea-related, that led him to be hailed not only as a shrewd psychologist of the human heart but also as one of the great masters of English prose.

Those of Irish descent, such as myself, know that often the greatest practitioners of the King’s tongue hail from the fringes of the English world—outcasts not so enthralled by the language that they can’t make it rise up, sing and dance to their delight and those of readers.

Still, Conrad’s is a remarkable case. The great propulsive element in his character was imagination. You cannot live in a landlocked mass like Poland, then run off to sea, without this quality. You cannot learn a notoriously difficult language in adulthood—not only well enough to motivate and command men, or even to write in your adopted language, but to do so at the highest levels in both capacities—without this quality, either.

One of my college American Literature professors once related to our class how, after reading Melville’s Moby Dick, he had been seized by such a strong desire to sail the seas that he promptly went down to register for the local merchant marine station. “Oh, you romantic college boys!” sighed the recruiter, rolling his eyes before chasing away the future English professor and Ivy League dean.

Surely something of the same impact must have registered on young Korzeniowski when he read English translations of such novelists as Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Thackeray, and Capt. Frederick Marryat. (The last of these in particular must have fired his imagination.) A youngster with the kind of background Jozef possessed needed as much distracting as possible—he already knew too much about loss.

The Russian arrest of his father, an aristocratic poet-translator who did nothing to hide his Polish patriotism, proved catastrophic for the family. Count Apollo Korzeniowski was arrested for his activities, then exiled along with his wife in Siberia. With both parents dead by the time he was 12, Jozef was taken in by his uncle.

Joseph Conrad’s fiction reverberate with guilt, the promises of life, the lashings of fate, loneliness, and physical and spiritual displacement, themes given their greatest resonance in the most elemental of environments—the sea. At age 17, desperate to avoid conscription by the Russian authorities who had crushed his country and his family, the young man journeyed, with his uncle’s blessing, from Poland to France, where he joined that country’s merchant marine.

The next four years were a blur for the young man, concluding with an unsuccessful attempt at suicide. (The wild nature of that attempt –shooting himself through the shoulder, just missing the vital organs—was so bizarre and clumsy that biographers have divided since then on whether he really was despondent over losing his money or whether this represented a crazed scheme to escape the clutches of creditors.)

In any case, Conrad’s decision to leave the French merchant marine for the British merchant navy conveniently relieved him of the possibility of being drafted into the Czar’s army. Eight years later, he would become a British citizen and earn his Master’s certificate as a seaman.

Conrad’s life on the seas was nearly as dramatic as any of his fictional tales, such as Heart of Darkness, The Nigger of the Narcissus, The Secret Agent, or my favorite, Lord Jim. Consider what befell him in his 19 years at sea:

* A back injury on the Highland Forest;
* being burned out on The Palestine when the cargo caught fire in the South China Sea and sank; * a trip on the Congo River in which he endured the wreck of his ship, fever, and dysentery, before being shipped home with a profound (and understandable!) nervous condition.


While recuperating, Conrad (he had so renamed himself by this point) turned to a manuscript on which he had worked for years. This time, he was able to complete Almayer’s Folly. Having tired of the day-to-day lifestyle of the sailor, he was happy to take up the literary life.

Though not, as it happened, thrilled with the stresses of it. The need to feed his wife and two sons—and, beginning in 1904, the need to provide medical care for his wife, now a permanent invalid—left him chronically broke and desperate.

Even the approval of friends such as John Galsworthy, Stephen Crane, H.G. Wells, and Henry James only went so far to relieve his anxiety. “It appears to me that I will never write anything worse reading,” he wrote at his lowest. After 18 years and 15 novels, he finally achieved success in 1913 with the bestselling Chance.

For prose writers like myself, F. Scott Fitzgerald set the bar high for crafting shimmering sentences that induce open-mouthed admiration, envy and joy; Ernest Hemingway provided an example of relentless self-discipline; but Conrad became an exemplar of courage—someone who, despite terrifying depths unknown and sights unseen, still casts off to chart the landscape of experience.

So, how did this native Pole come to stand on the pinnacle of English letters at his life’s end? The answer might lie in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, in which he observes: “The light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words; of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.”