The former journalist turned literary superstar who died Tuesday at the age of 74 lived by that credo of experiencing everything for himself. He spent most of his life exploring many of the most dangerous places in the world, never hesitating to jump into the next flashpoint. Wasn’t he terrified at times, I asked him after getting to know him well. “All the time, but I just can’t stop,” he replied with his typically disarming smile. And he couldn’t stop churning out books that were breathtaking in their imagery, poignant in their evocation of mood, and electrifying in their sense of danger and dread.
It’s hard to imagine a more improbable career for someone who began his life as a reporter in communist Poland, where journalism was a claustrophobic profession crippled by censorship and chronic political intrigue. But the young Kapuscinski caused a huge stir with a gritty description of the woes of steel workers in southern Poland, which won him the applause of the “reform communists” of 1956. Rewarded with the rare chance to travel abroad, he was asked where he wanted to go. “Czechoslovakia,” he blurted out. “It was such a dream come true that I couldn’t think of a more distant country,” he told me.
Soon he had no such problems. Free to travel to report for the Polish Press Agency on “countries which people did not know or care about,” he felt liberated from his homeland, where the hopes for reform had quickly faded. He covered coups, wars of liberation, civil wars, famines and droughts—often disappearing for weeks and months into remote regions, seemingly oblivious to the risks. Aside from dodging bullets and bombs, he had a nearly fatal case of cerebral malaria and a bad bout with tuberculosis in Africa. He could be moody, even depressed, but also drew inspiration from a sunrise in the desert or the slow rhythms of a remote village still relatively untouched by modern civilization.
Soon he left ordinary journalism behind altogether. His books, he explained, were “literary collages.” “More than straight reporting is necessary,” he said. “The other important element is reflection. The pure account does not satisfy. The pure account is provided by television.” He’d read voraciously before and during his travels, and then allow himself to reflect on his own feelings and sensations wherever he was. As he admitted over dinner one night, he preferred not even to take notes during his journeys. He would write later, offering his readers the memories of his experiences rather than transcribing them directly.
The result was often deliberately impressionistic and unabashedly allegorical. That was no accident. When he wrote about dictators like Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie in “The Emperor” or the Shah of Iran in “Shah of Shahs,” he was describing a system that felt all too familiar to his compatriots back home in communist Poland. Even after the collapse of communism, he continued his journeys far from home, losing himself for long stretches in his old stomping grounds of Africa or Latin America, where he had operated as a young journalist. The frequently petty politics of the new Poland felt trivial by comparison, with none of the magical allure that he always craved—and always found. He’d write in Warsaw, but his world was wherever his imagination, and any means of transportation, could take him.
