“He is deeply detached from us,” Putrament observed, after meeting with Milosz in person. Sure enough, a few days before Christmas, Milosz was summoned back to Poland, and his passport was confiscated. He was being transferred to Paris so that he would be within reach of Warsaw. Milosz, who had been working as a diplomat in the United States for four years, was no longer considered trustworthy by his superiors. The language was polite, even confiding, but the message could not have been clearer. I am happy that you will be coming here, because I have been worried about you a little: whether the splendor of material goods in America has overshadowed poverty in other aspects of life.” Now the arch-commissar of Polish literature told the poet, “I heard that you are to be moved to Paris. . . . The two men had known each other for many years-they had been contributors to the same student magazine in college, in the early nineteen-thirties-but their paths had diverged widely. In July, 1950, Czeslaw Milosz, the cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., received a letter from Jerzy Putrament, the general secretary of the Polish Writers’ Union. Milosz wrote that creativity came from an “inner command” to express the truth.
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