Barnard College

Although his name may not be familiar to some readers—the erudite manager of my local, independent bookstore didn’t know it—the Polish journalist and author Ryszard (pronounced Ree-SHAR) Kapuściński is venerated among leading writers, filmmakers, and other artists in the U.S. and Europe as a master of reportage and a literary giant, and as a man of great sweetness, vision, and generosity. For his job as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, which he joined in 1962, he threw himself into dire situations all over Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, filing one-page reports when he could. Hungry to chronicle the novelistic details of what he witnessed, as well as to portray the individuals he met along the way, he began to write the books for which he has become famous. (The actual reports apparently have never been published as such in English.) Since his death earlier this year, there has been an outpouring of tributes to and remembrances of him, including this one, with some 600 people packed into the the Bartos Forum at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. My one puzzlement about the otherwise fascinating and exemplary session was that no one mentioned that Kapuściński had a family in Poland. As Elaine Woo wrote in his obit in The New York Times: “Although married and a father, he led a nomadic life, spending years in desolate outposts of Africa in part because the Polish news agency could not afford to bring him home. He is survived by his wife, Alicja, a pediatrician, and a daughter.” A man of mysteries, it would seem.

    In keeping with the paradoxes of Kapuściński’s character, those remembrances have not stinted on the subject’s humanity--or the vodka toasts. (This is a writer who drank and smoked.) Paul Holdengräber, director of public programs at the library, read a written tribute to Kapuściński by the filmmaker Werner Herzog, which told how the filmmaker and the journalist had once planned to make a sci-fi picture, Science in Reverse, about their mutual concern that civilization was entering a situation similar to that of Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire, the period of some 1,000 years commonly called “the Dark Ages.” “‘We were convinced that our high technological culture is not sustainable,”’ Mr. Holdengräber quoted Mr. Herzog as saying. Mr. Herzog wanted to find out, through this film, how German society “could have turned barbaric [under the Nazi regime] after hundreds of years of culture.” They planned to shoot the film in the Sudan; however, at that time, nine factions fighting there made the project impossible, and the film was never undertaken. As Mr. Herzog once told Mr. Holdengräber, “every grey hair on my head is called ‘Kapuściński.’” This reminded Mr. Holdengräber of the time he had asked Kapuściński—who had been taken prisoner forty times and condemned to death on four occasions in the course of his reporting—“what was the worst?” Kapuściński answered that he had “once been locked into a dark dungeon by drunken soldiers, who kept throwing poisonous snakes into my cell.” After a slight pause, he added, “That was not so good. Within a week, my hair turned completely white.”

     Kapuściński was a staunch friend of PEN over many years, made clear by the luminaries who populated this deeply affectionate tribute session: the novelist Salman Rushdie (PEN American Center’s president), the South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, the film and theater actress Elzbieta Czyzewska (who read from Kapuściński’s writing in English translation), the German philosopher and scholar Carolin Emcke, the author Philip Gourevitch (editor of The Paris Review), the Polish author and political figure Adam Michnik (editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, the first independent daily newspaper in Poland), and the author and former New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Weschler (now director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Chicago Humanities Festival). English speakers who haven’t read Kapuściński’s books may know his work from excerpts translated in William Shawn’s New Yorker and other prominent journals. At least, that’s how I knew a little of it—excerpted in periodicals. His most famous work is The Emperor (1978), an account of Haile Selassie, of Ethiopia, and the excerpt that Ms Czyzewska read from that—concerning the functionaries whose job it was exclusively to open doors for the emperor or to keep his legs from dangling when he sat in a chair—is writing so vivid and expressive of the author’s appetite for life and gift for negative capability as to inspire anyone to daydream, Walter Mitty-fashion, about running into the middle of the Third World, BlackBerry in hand, to cover the next insurrection, or famine, or torture session. Kapuściński was also a photographer, and his images, projected large at the library on two screens, were filled with people at their most vital, too, even when they were starving. Yet when one really begins to take stock of what he had to go through to get those stories and photographs—the physical trials, the terrifying arrests, the years of wearying loneliness in blank hotel rooms, or freezing steppes, or sweltering deserts—the daydreams pop. Worst of all, perhaps, was the constant misery he had to witness without being able to do anything to alleviate it. There was nothing glamorous about his existence as a foreign correspondent. To the contrary, it is a marvel of his prose is that he was able to endow a life whose conditions veered between dreary waiting and horrific crisis with insight into and empathy for other people—and to place those fluent, often lustrous thoughts and feelings in a context of glittering, even seductive ideas, as in this passage from Shah of Shahs about the doomed liberal Iranian prime minister, Doctor Mossadegh, “Old Mossy”:

       “People remembered what Mossy said. It stayed in their minds and remains alive to this day. Words that open our eyes to the world are always easiest to remember. And so it was with those words. Could anyone say that Mossy was wrong in what he did and said? Today everyone says that he was right, but that the problem is he was right too early. You can’t be right too early, because then you risk your own career and at times your own life. It takes a long time for a truth to mature, and in the meantime people suffer or blunder around in ignorance. But suddenly along comes a man who speaks that truth too soon, before it has become universal, and then the ruling powers strike out at the heretic and burn him at the stake or lock him up or hang him because he threatens their interests or disturbs their peace.”

      As the various panelists explained, Kapuściński, born in 1932, grew up very poor, in Pinsk. He made his way to Warsaw University, though, where he graduated in history in 1955. From childhood, he was a dreamer, with an imagination so closely woven with his intelligence that it could sometimes compromise his reporting. Mr. Rushdie accorded him the dignity of noticing that in life: “In The Emperor, there is a certain disrespect for certain facts that you occasionally encounter in Kapuściński. He wrote that Haile Selassie died in bed believing he was God. Haile Selassie actually was murdered in his bed. I asked Ryszard about that.” The author was a bit miffed: he felt he had “the artist’s right” to make a change that would tell a better story. Mr. Rushdie suggested that the rest of the panel might discuss this dimension of Kapuściński’s writing, and some speakers referred to it. Alas, there wasn’t enough time for a full-fledged discussion of it.

        According to Mr. Rushdie, the most interesting thing that Kapuściński ever told him was about how he escaped with his life in tense situations—when he was captured by rogue militias, for instance. “‘I make myself unimportant,’” Kapuściński answered. “‘I make myself seem not worthy of the bullet.’” Mr. Rushdie went on: “He had this ability to do that, simply become a zero. As a result, he lived to tell the tale.”  In a scene from Gabrielle Pfeiffer’s documentary film A Poet on the Frontline: The Reportage of Ryszard Kapuściński, portions of which were screened at the library, an interviewer—perhaps Ms Pfeiffer, herself—asks Kapuściński whether he had an “attraction to danger, or is it simply an inconvenience?” “No,” he replies, “danger is a terrible thing.”

         Some comments about Ryszard Kapuściński by the other panelists:

         Carolin Emcke: “I knew him first and foremost as a reader. I was a young aspiring journalist myself, and a trained philosopher, but I chose to read novelists and poetry. Kapuściński was the only journalist I really read. I wasn’t interested in the content of his stories; I was interested in the narrator, the subject of the book, the person writing these stories. And I was most interested in his sensuality. He wrote about heat, sweat, drinks, rain, dirt, food, the transformation of a decaying, dying body like nobody I’d ever read—the impact of travel, of temperature on the senses of the narrator.

         “He brought his own vulnerability into focus. He never claimed to be unmoved by what he witnessed. He wrote about the fragility of judgment, of other people, about himself. In this vulnerability, he described the human condition.

         “My image of the writer was completed by knowledge of the mensch. (At this point, Ms Emcke read a portion of a poem by Bertholt Brecht, “The Song about the Good People.” It includes the line: “One knows the good people by the fact that they get better when one knows them.”

          Breyten Breytenbach: “Is Kapuściński the only thing we have in common around the table?

                                         “His unbelievably self-effacing gentleness. And generosity. . . .

                                         “His vanity: he always took off his glasses before a photograph was taken.

                                         “His courtliness, self-effacing optimism about Africa, great warmth, great culture. . . .”

                                         Mr. Breytenbach also read a long poem he’d written a while ago for Kapuściński, “Looking for the Road.” It includes the lines, “one travels so deeply from language to language,” and “The origin of existence is movement.”

           Adam Michnik (speaking in Polish, which was translated by Ian Gross):

                         “He was a very modest man. His most pungent sentences were spoken in a whisper.

                        “His books are like wine, the older the better.

                         Mr. Michnik remarked that the first time he read The Emperor, he didn’t like the way it was written. “But, of course, it turned out that if he wrote the way I wanted him to write, nobody would pick up the book to read.

                         “In his youth, Kapuściński was a Communist. He never pretended otherwise. [He once said to Mr. Michnik:] ‘To tell you the truth, I’m still on the side of the poor ones against those in power.’ This is a key to understanding his attitudes. So when he was writing about the revolutions, he kept in mind that he was someone privileged. He was fascinated by those who were standing up tall and reaching out for freedom. His main ambition was to explain to his readers, especially his Polish readers, that there are others. What hurt him most was the turning away from others, those that are excluded.”

                          Mr. Michnik last saw Kapuściński three days before his operation and four days before he died. “What’s going on in politics?” the patient asked. “Very little nice news to tell,” said Mr. Michnik, who then told his dying friend two jokes “from Soviet times.”  The first one, I didn’t quite understand. The second went like this:

Someone faints on the street, and an ambulance comes for him. The person regains consciousness as the ambulance speeds along. “Where are you taking me?,” he asks. “To the morgue,” says the ambulance attendant. “What do you mean? I’m still alive!” “Ah, but we didn’t get there yet.”

          Philip Gourevitch:

                      “He went to places of great danger and that were extremely difficult to understand, and places where the baseness of humanity and the inspiring were all on show. And he not only survived but came out and wrote exquisitely. Fate was his subject, much more than the news. . .And he should have won a Nobel Prize if there were not a hideous prejudice against reportage. He was ultimately a memoirist, like Primo Levi. He was a Chaplinesque figure, too, a prose poet of great disorientations. Whether he was afflicted with malaria in Uganda or lost in the Kalahari, he was obliged—because he was a wire-service man—to file at the Western Union office. . . He somehow became the people he was writing about. It was not so much that he became insignificant, but that he was aware that he was insignificant. And he was a kind of Surrealist; he had an incredibly fine-tuned sense of the absurd.

            Ren Wechsler:

                      “Imagine those censors in 1970’s Poland: He’s writing about an ally, the Communist regime in Ethiopia. But they understood in some way that he was writing about them.

                      “He was at the New York Institute of the Humanities for six weeks when he was at the New York Public Library, writing his Herodotus book (Travels with Herodotus). He gave a talk, and Susan Sontag was in the audience. ‘What do you care about Herodotus?!,’ she said to him. ‘It’s Thucydides you should care about!!’ He came back pure white and shaking. ‘Ren,’ he said, ‘what am I going to do? She invited me for lunch!’” At that lunch, she served him “a big white plate with a big slab of steak, nothing else. ‘With these knives! Ren, what does it mean?’”