In that year of 1933, the year in which my first book was published, my father died. He had been ill for many months, but his condition worsened suddenly, and when he passed away only my mother and I were present. It wasn’t till the following day that my brothers arrived from the country.
This death left me with a rather shameful memory. When he died, I tried to embrace my mother so as in this way at least to show my feelings; but the gesture came out awkwardly, and in the blink of an eye the entire abjectness of my situation was revealed to me: I was incapable of ordinary human reactions, of sincerity, tenderness; I was as it were paralyzed by form, style, by this whole accursed manner that I’d created for myself … and here I was, incapable of offering my own mother a little warmth at such a moment! Relations were distant in our family; we were too critical, ironic, sarcastic; our sense of the ridiculous was too great, and this killed any more intense response in us. I’m speaking of myself and my brothers, since both the women—my sister and my mother—were rather victims of this state of affairs. But my father had an uncommunicative, Lithuanian nature, and his relations with us were not close.
When my brothers appeared and there began the complicated process of arranging the funeral, a macabre mixture of grief and social, even financial, affairs, along with common snobbery (how should the obituary look in the Kurier Warszawski? who would speak at the service?), my distaste and anger took precedence over all my other feelings. I didn’t reproach myself or my brothers that we were not able to grasp the fact of the death right away. After all, no one is in control of their feelings, and besides, sentiment had to find its own, more intimate moment. But I was irked by our powerlessness in the face of form and its conventional demands, and by the docility with which we donned funereal expressions, even though in our black suits we really were grief-stricken.
Yes, at the funeral I was racked by dismal reflections. Our family was coming to an end. Appearances to the contrary, and despite the fact that my brothers had married and had children, it was a family in decline; the unhealthy blood of the Kotkowskis, which we had inherited from our mother and which burdened us with the possibility of psychological disturbances, was probably the direct cause of the disorder. My father was the last of the Gombrowiczes who enjoyed respect and inspired confidence; we, the next generation, were eccentrics of whom it was said, “What a pity they didn’t take after old Gombrowicz.” Concerning myself I had no illusions: I knew I was a kind of psychological cripple for whom a normal existence was out of the question, and who had to seek his own path. Sensitivity, imagination, complexes, fears, and obsessions preyed on me all the more as they were concealed from view, and perhaps that’s why I felt so bad about looking well and even contented. But truth be told, there was no straightforward path for me, and I knew that if I didn’t justify myself in my own eyes and those of others with some higher accomplishment, nothing remained for me but to descend to the level of a garden-variety degenerate.
These were sharp, harsh, hurtful thoughts, which visited me at other times too; and I regard them as having great significance in my entire development. In Poland, by and large, no one was aware of the connections between art (and the whole life of the mind in general) and sickness. On this subject an astounding optimism reigned amongst us; for Poles, an artist was not “a neurotic carrying out his own course of treatment,” as Freud had it, but a fellow who creates out of an excess of well-being and vital forces, with the help of a special gift of the gods called talent. According to this account, art arises not from illness but from health. This superficial optimism has spread to the artists themselves—how often have I met poets, painters, or writers who were real clinical cases, up to their ears in pathologies, yet utterly convinced that there was nothing wrong with them and even that they could be models for others. The fact that I never deluded myself and always remained fully aware of my infirmities allowed me to situate my writing in a more real and tragic climate; but it also allowed me to obtain a distance on my sickness, and who knows if this didn’t give me a clearer feeling of healthiness and normality. For a sick man knows more about health than a healthy man, just as a hungry man knows more about bread.
After my father’s death the eight-room apartment on Służewska Street was too big for my mother and sister. They moved to a smaller, very pleasant apartment on Chocimska, with a view of Wilanów; I took a place close by, in the same building. In this way I was able to take my meals at my mother’s, which had its advantages.
At the time I was working on opus number two, the comedy Princess Ivona. I don’t know if it will be of interest to my future biographers that I wrote a good portion of Ivona lying on the rug in the living room on Służewska Street. This strange position came about because I had to keep an eye on my father, who was in bed in the next room, already only semiconscious, and prone to considerable nervous agitation.
I wrote Ivona with great difficulty and great reluctance. I decided to exploit for the theater the technique I’d developed in my stories—the capacity for devising a disconnected and often absurd motif, a little like a musical motif. What was coming out for me was a scathing absurdity that was quite unlike the plays being written at the time. I struggled unrelentingly with form. Those awful hours spent immobile in front of a sheet of paper, when the pen is idle and the imagination desperately seeks solutions, while the whole emerging edifice creaks and threatens to collapse!
At that time I also began to be drawn into journalism. The initiative came from the magazine Polska Zbrojna, whose editor had published an exceedingly enthusiastic review of Recollections of Adolescence; he subsequently asked me to write a column for him. At this point I came to realize that being a columnist was an entirely different kettle of fish! All my artistic skills were insufficient for those damned articles, which were a dead loss. The editor had soon had enough. Sometime later Miedziński, the editor of Gazeta Polska, who along with other personages from government circles used to take part in my brothers’ hunting parties, offered me some work; this time something suddenly clicked in me. I developed a flair for newspaper writing, I tossed off a few articles like no one’s business, and people began to congratulate me. What of it, though, since my next article was rejected. I discontinued the supply. I was financially independent. This was a great and perhaps somewhat immoral phrase. I could thumb my nose at everything!
At last Ivona was finished. I asked Adaś Mauersberger’s advice on what to do with it.
“Show it to Mira,” he said. “She’s the most intelligent actress I know, and she has a fine understanding of the theater. She’ll tell you if it can be played, and who you should give it to.”
Mira Zimińska was indeed intelligent, and witty too. However, I had my reasons for concern, since with actors, and especially actresses, I was in a state of war. Was it because, as I was fond of saying in theater circles, someone who puts on faces in public is not a respectable person? No, the real reason was deeper and more hidden. I didn’t like performers: I considered them a lower category of artist, and it angered me that they enjoyed greater fame and recognition than true creators. This was probably one more manifestation of my inner protest against second-rateness in art, which irritated me all the more because it made me think of our Polish second-rateness in world culture. But I was even more critical of actresses than of actors and was in the habit of pretending that I didn’t know them—I would introduce myself to each one every time I met them. Once, when for the fifth time I presented myself courteously and with a gallant bow to a certain diva, she immediately seized a glass of water and poured it over my head.
Mira luckily was not set against me. But her theatrical horizons were insufficiently broad for her to appreciate an innovative play like Ivona. She told me that the beginning wasn’t bad, but that the rest was hopeless.
*
On New Year’s Eve, to bid farewell to 1934 I organized an artistic booze-up in my mother’s apartment on Chocimska. My mother and sister were in the country at the time, and so I could do what I wished in the apartment. The party, which lasted till six in the morning, was a visible indication of my sound position in the literary circles of Warsaw. I no longer remember exactly who the guests were, but they certainly included Breza, the Mauersbergers, and Tonio Sobański; Rudnicki was there, and I think Choromański too; there was the brotherhood of topers led by Światek Karpiński and “Minio,” in other words, Janusz Minkiewicz; there was a sprinkling of actresses, Zdzisław Czermański, Kanarek (who today is a well-known painter in the United States); and maybe Witkacy and perhaps Bruno Schulz. I was under the influence, like everyone there, and pretended to be having a good time; but this didn’t stop me from realizing once again how far my nature was from this kind of merriment.
I didn’t know how to enjoy myself in this way. I had “bad alcohol,” as was explained to me by the great expert Światek Karpiński—mine was a hypochondriac and hepatic alcohol that didn’t connect me to anyone, but on the contrary, alienated me. This melancholy property was not, of course, without influence on my literary destiny, since in Poland it’s easier to imagine a writer without a pen than one without a glass in his hand. That doesn’t mean that I did not keep company with drinkers and didn’t have companions and even friends amongst them; yet it was always a qualified friendship, a little forced and often somewhat false. I never knew how to get excited about the antics of those friends of mine: When it was recounted how Światek, in a drunken haze, took some fish up and down in an elevator “to give them a good time,” or how Minio was left penniless after a night of libations and so at seven in the morning stood outside Miss Plater’s highly respectable school for young ladies and, with hat in hand, begged the arriving schoolgirls for a couple of pennies so he could at least buy some vodka—I appreciated the humor of these situations, but as it were from a distance.
This brotherhood in intoxication—Światek, Minio, Dołęga-Mostowicz, Jurkowski, and many others—was perhaps one of the most distinctive features of the Warsaw of that time. Today I would call them “precursors,” since those wise men seemed to have read clearly in the book of fate, and so they drowned in vodka the absurdity of the Polish situation, the tragic inevitability that cast doubt on any honest effort. To the best of my knowledge, today that lushes’ league has many members in Poland, and they have their own good reasons for being there. In those days, the band of poet-drinkers was brought together under the banner of mockery, jokes, word play, fun and games, and witty stories; they took nothing seriously except vodka and women. Not even finances! Though they also had a talent for money-making and could wring a buck from anything. Światek Karpiński, a poet—the only real poet amongst them—provided texts for the cabarets; he collaborated with Minkiewicz on an annual Christmas pantomime, and he wrote comic rhyming epigrams for Kurier Warszawski All this secured him a sizable income, which he liquidated in various nighttime establishments. He used to claim that jokes were entirely a matter of technique and that he had a method of manufacturing them in any amount, on demand. As for Janusz Minkiewicz, he was a poet too, but of a lighter caliber, a poet-songwriter in the Parisian style, with what is called charm. He affected an indolent, languid, slow, catlike air, virtually purring those jokes of his. He was Światek’s best friend, and a significant part of what he earned was thanks to Światek. The third of these musketeers, Dołęga-Mostowicz, had a considerable income from his trashy novels, dashed off “for a broader public” and devoid of any artistic pretensions. He lived handsomely in a side wing of the Poznańskis’ palace on the Aleje Ujazdowskie; he had a soft spot for antiques, and he gave weekly “five o’clock teas,” which began on Tuesdays at five in the afternoon and ended on Thursday morning with the entire company, including the host, lying paralytic on the sumptuous marble floor. Who did not take part in those events! There I would meet the Halam gang, famous from the ballet, Wiech, the Prince of Hohenlohe, and goodness knows who else!
Jurkowski manufactured cheap romance novels, like Dołęga-Mostowicz, and was a kind of back-up Dołega, in my eyes at least.
As I mentioned, the object of worship of the assemblage was “a sense of humor.” Whoever lacked it had no business there. It was through humor that the endless consumption of alcohol approached salvation. Since my first book had earned the full approval of the booze-befuddled jokesters, I was someone they appreciated, and even—after Ferdydurke—admired. And so I was plied with vodka, with great feeling, almost with maternal warmth, as if in the expectation that at any moment I would come out with some magnificent “line”—which never happened, since lines were not my specialty.
For an author like me, not popular, and more accustomed to receiving brickbats than praise, such warm acknowledgment was very moving; but I always took care not to allow myself to be bought over, and it even afforded me a sinister pleasure when someone who respected and loved me was rewarded with my merciless criticism. To be frank, Minio’s charms, Światek’s poeticality, or Dołęga-Mostowicz’s drunken flights of imagination engendered repulsion more than feelings of friendship in me. What was it that so repelled me? The sybaritism? The lasciviousness? The softness, the flaccidity, the crumpledness of that fraternity? The stupidity of the females, who were often good-looking, and who allowed themselves to be taken in by the trappings of art and intellect? The cheapness of the poetry, calculatedly written to obtain whores and money? The often triumphal self-satisfaction of those smooth operators who knew how to milk the bourgeoisie?
In sexual matters I’m no Cato; I would say that in such things, for me more important than the sin itself is “how” one sins, and above all “who” is sinning. I’m prepared to forgive a great deal in fresh and bewitching individuals; whereas the excesses of bloated, inebriated men do not enthuse me, and I was disgusted to see girls worthy of a better fate falling for the lures of such fellows. Above all, I held it against those poets that they had virtually no poetry in them, and that the little they had, they did not respect.
They may have had other good qualities of which I was unaware, and which incidentally could not have manifested themselves in that lifestyle of theirs, which took place between the Adria and the Zodiak. In a social sense too they constituted a rather disgraceful phenomenon. It’s well known that the measure of a nation’s culture is not its highest art, which is the creation of exceptional individuals, but precisely its second-rank literature, in which good manners, both on the part of the author and of the reader, can be more important than talent. None of this set was an artist on a larger scale and none of them could harbor any pretentions to excellence, but despite this their writing could have carried the marks of decency that distinguish an educated, well-read person with some discernment and a disciplined imagination from an ordinary producer of trash. Unfortunately, the popular novels of Dołęga-Mostowicz and Jurkowski, with the possible exception of The Career of Nikodem Dyzma, were written for the gutter, the Warsaw gutter, and for the factory workers. Karpiński’s epigrams and articles, and Minkiewicz’s epigrams and songs, had the appearance of solid workmanship—those two cultivated their metier and like a respectable business they didn’t sell shoddy merchandise. And yet this too was an unkempt, disordered world, anarchic in the Russian way—they weren’t bad people, but they lacked that reflex of a cultured person which is a matter of heredity, upbringing, and tradition, and often successfully substitutes for a lack of an outlook on life, of morality and faith. From year to year they wallowed deeper in licentiousness and all the mean tricks that go with it; from year to year they were more broken, drunker, and more desperate. Right until the war came along.
*
Every evening around nine I’d head out to the café—the Ziemiańska, which was popular in those days. I would sit at a table, order a “small black” coffee and wait till my café companions gathered.
A café can become an addiction just as vodka can. For a real habitué, not to go to the café at the designated time is simply to fall ill. In a short time I became such a fanatic that I set aside all my other evening activities, including the theater, movies, and my social life. It must be added that a Warsaw café, and the Ziemiańska in particular, was not like other cafés of the world. One entered from the street into darkness, a fearful haze of smoke and stale air, from which abyss there loomed astonishing faces striving to communicate by shouts and gestures in the ever-present din. The aquiline features of various schöngeists, in other words intellectual aesthetes, fraternized with honest, round, peasant mugs from the country that had arrived the day before from Lublin or Lwów province; there were also wily faces of shysters from the suburbs, and occasionally one glimpsed the walrus mustache of a country squire—for this was a café of poets, and poets are born everywhere, like vermin.
The Ziemiańska had its own hierarchy. In the intellectual sense it was a multistoreyed edifice, and it wasn’t so easy to transplant oneself from a lower floor to a higher one.
The first floor was composed of a variety of young people, beginners who were not yet known and generally had no right to speak; and also other supporters, mostly recruited from the semi-intelligentsia, whose lack of education and polish made it difficult for them to take part in the symposia. They were somewhat like a Greek chorus, but a voiceless one that was important simply by its presence—when a handful of speechless enthusiasts silently joined a particular group, this meant that at the table in question noteworthy things would happen, for these were connoisseurs who didn’t miss a single paper share at this literary stock market. When it transpired that my table’s stocks were rising, such folk immediately began to pull their chairs up with the air of people taking a seat in the front rows of the theater. Night after night this took place in absolute silence; only once in a while would someone cough or giggle.
The second floor was above all the “poets of the proletariat.” This name included not just working-class bards but also those who, originating in the lower social spheres, had become worshippers of all sorts of surrealism, Dadaism, and other such ultramodernism, with which they compensated for the more glaring problems arising from their primitivism and backwardness. They took part in discussions, but not without difficulty, since they usually had only one hobbyhorse to ride—for instance, Marxism, or the esthetics of Peiper’s poetry, or psychoanalysis—and all the other horses of humanity were unknown to them. It must be admitted that the overwhelming majority of the Ziemiańska’s regulars fell into this rather uncomfortable category. The ignorance of these intellectuals was quite incredible; from a mixture of concepts and readings, from scraps and pieces acquired here and there in no order, there sprang up fantastical understandings, like Falstaff’s cloud taking on ever different shapes.
The next floor up comprised those who already had a “name”: authors and artists whose stocks had been noted, though they couldn’t yet claim to be famous. And at the very top—even literally, for they occupied the mezzanine, elevated above the crowd—was the glorious table of the Skamandrists: Słonimski, Tuwim, Iwaszkiewicz, Wieniawa-Długoszowski, and other great figures, bandying their jokes about.
My manner in the Ziemiańska was characterized by a nonchalance clearly signaling that I’d no need to “earn a living by the pen” and thus to hurry my writing career along too anxiously. I hardly ever joined the Skamandrists, since I wasn’t yet on an even footing with them, and I could not allow myself to behave with them the way I would have liked. In fact, I was not fussy about my choice of company; who joined my table was really a matter of some indifference to me, and I was quite happy even with the more grotesque semi-intellectuals, since they constituted a much more unpredictable and poetic element than folk in straight neckties and well-trimmed noggins. With a blush of modesty, but also with justifiable pride, I can say that I soon acquired considerable popularity in the Ziemiańska, and my table was frequently visited by a sizable crowd of fans, who took their places at it even before I arrived. My jokes, facial expressions, sayings, my dialectics, my poetic flights of fancy, my philosophical and psychological reasoning, artistic declarations, crushing attacks, and insidious provocations—all this electrified my listeners, and mostly because it happened to be the antithesis of the accepted norm in the Ziemiańska. I was not a great lover of poetry; I was neither excessively progressive, nor modern; I was not a typical intellectual, nor a nationalist, nor a Catholic, nor a communist, not a right-winger; I didn’t worship science, or art, or Marx. Then what was I at that time? Most often, I was the negation of my disconcerted interlocutor, who only after many sittings realized that I was discussing for sport, for amusement, and also out of curiosity, just to investigate the reverse of every thesis. That contrariness, which had remained from discussions with my mother in my youth, gave my dialogues a high-spirited imaginativeness, and at the same time sometimes led us into truly unexpected territory. I suspect that the amount of nonsense, claptrap, and hogwash uttered by me in the Ziemiańska reached astronomical proportions; and yet through all this insanity there shone my natural common sense and the clear-headedness, the realism that was so alert in me. For all my eccentricities, my behavior in the Ziemiańska had entirely solid foundations and, I believe, was in fact far from being foolish.
I needed victims. I was happy to chance upon some naive and fervent individual with whom I could toy like a cat playing with a mouse. And it sometimes happened that these victims became admirers, even friends—it was in this way I acquired the circle that in later years included Stefan Otwinowski and his wife, Ewa; the poet Staś Piętak; Lipiński, the editor of Szpilki, and his wife; Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and others. At times there were brief conflicts when things got out of hand and one or another person would jump up with a clatter and leave in a huff. But generally speaking, people were more often entertained than offended.
I shall return again to my activities in the Ziemiańska, the Ipsa, and the Zodiak, since in time they acquired substance; I even dare think that they weren’t wholly without influence on the literary atmosphere of the country. This claim may seem exaggerated to many serious literati from those times, but it must be explained that I operated almost exclusively on the lower floor—the upper one knew virtually nothing about what was going on there. Once Boy-Żeleński, a seasoned frequenter of cafés, grabbed me by the sleeve: “I hear, sir, that you rule over the Ziemiańska, and that you won’t allow any of us in!” It was true: I held the fort, I was prophet, maestro, and clown, but only amongst individuals like me who had not fully “arrived” and who were unpolished and inferior. I preferred not to associate with the others, the worthies, with whom I could never allow myself to joke, make fun, or provoke, on whom I couldn’t impose my own style; they bored me and I knew that I bored them. Yet many of those who had not yet arrived finally did so, and even occupied leading positions. Today, reading certain Polish books I sometimes come across passages that might not have been written without those conversations back then. What’s soaked up by the youthful shell, in later age becomes its smell.
Associating with me was always, as it is today, rather difficult, because as a rule I aim at debate and conflict; I try to lead the discussion in such a way as to make it risky, sometimes even unpleasant and embarrassing and indiscreet, because such an approach engages both my personality and that of my interlocutor. The pleasant, calm, gentle conversation usually found in literary circles always seemed to me to be mortally insipid and unworthy of those who are intellectually alert.
*
Here’s a strange thing: I cannot recall how I first met Bruno Schulz. Was it at one of Zofia Nałkowska’s gatherings? No, I believe he telephoned me to say he had read my Recollections of Adolescence and would like to talk with me.
But I can see him as he was when I first laid eyes on him: a tiny little fellow. Small and timid, with an oh-so-quiet voice; inconspicuous, mild, yet with something cruel and severe concealed behind an almost childlike gaze.
This little fellow was the most outstanding artist of all those I knew in Warsaw. He was immeasurably greater than Kaden, Nałkowska, Goetel, and so many other literary academicians who glittered with honors and dominated the press and the salons of the capital. The prose that came from his pen was imaginative and immaculate; amongst us he was the most European writer, with the right to take his place amongst the greatest intellectual and artistic aristocracy of Europe. And yet, when I met him—and it was [after] the publication of his book Cinnamon Shops—Bruno was a modest schoolteacher in Drohobycz who had come to the capital for a couple of months, a vulnerable creature for whom people felt sorry. He remained such a browbeaten provincial teacher till his tragic death in a German camp. And I’m afraid that today, for reasons I shall explain in a moment, it’s too late for his art to be appreciated in the West. And in Poland, who knows him today? A few hundred poets? A handful of writers? He has remained what he was, a prince traveling incognito.
At that time, when he came to my apartment on Służewska Street, his literary position was nevertheless much more solid than mine. He hadn’t reached a broader readership, but the elite knew him and held him in high regard. Yet Bruno’s masochistic nature drove him to remove himself to the background. He preferred admiring to being admired. Quietly, confidentially, with a goodness that was nevertheless strange—I might say that it was at bottom hard—he began by singing my praises.
“What a book! I’m bowled over by your short stories. I’d never be capable of writing anything like this myself.”
Later on I found out, not without chagrin, that Bruno was generous with his enthusiasm for other writers too—and not only because he liked to bring people pleasure. In that provincial fellow there dwelled a desire for luxury, for lofty hierarchies, for glory and pride. And yet the almost painful severity one sensed perhaps not even so much in him as in his vicinity, as if lurking in the corner, compelled me to take his opinions concerning my writing most seriously. And I was soon to learn that these were not empty phrases—no one showed me so much magnanimous friendship or stood by me so fervently.
This was the beginning of numerous conversations, hardly ever on personal topics. Bruno brought from Drohobycz an insatiable thirst for mental and intellectual companionship; in this he was sometimes feverish and wearisome. He asked and listened—I opened up and expatiated—he commented, clarified, and got to the heart of the matter, posing even newer questions. From the first moment he assumed a rather passive attitude in respect to me, of one who gathers information and asks questions. It might have seemed that he was destined to play second fiddle. Yet his capacity for focus and his intensity, a sort of extraordinary acceptance of his own fate, his own destiny, the demonic power of his passion, which arose somewhere in the sexual sphere and for this reason was so tragic and ardent, made his modest head-nodding into something more momentous. And it was enough to open his book to find an entirely different Schulz: majestic, with sentences that were weighty and magnificent, unraveling gradually like the dazzling tail of the peacock, a poet with inexhaustible powers of creating metaphors, exceptionally sensitive to form, and capable of modulations and gradations, rendering his ironically Baroque prose like a song. Many of the artistic tasks he set himself were utterly perilous; yet he never came to grief. Nevertheless, in my continued contacts with him I discovered two flaws that weakened his range. First, he was too much a poet and only a poet; because of this his prose, laden with metaphor, partially gave the impression of a mistake that should have been categorized as poetry, his true element. And second, like all Polish poets he was utterly helpless beyond metaphor; he couldn’t deal with the real world and was incapable of assimilating it. He had developed his own form, which was narrow if infinitely deep, and he was unable to write differently or to go beyond his own rather meager subject matter.
Such people achieve great things when they are original. But Bruno followed in the footsteps of Kafka, with whom he shared his Semitic blood, and though in many ways he was innovative, it’s hard to deny that the other man’s vision impregnated his world too. This is why I do not predict a worldwide success for his work, which today is translated into foreign languages, even though it’s won the admiration of many eminent English and French readers.
From me he differed principally in the fact that, though like him I was concerned with form, I aimed to break it up and I sought to broaden my literature so it could encompass ever more phenomena, whereas he shut himself up in his form as in a fortress, or a prison.
I’ve never met anyone less envious, and more magnanimously generous. It must be confessed that envy is a common quality of writers; but they are intelligent, and to a great extent this civilizes their potential uncouthness. In most cases they will not do harm, but neither will they raise a finger to help a rival’s ascent to Parnassus. Bruno’s wonderful unselfishness appeared in all its glory when my third book, the novel Ferdydurke, came out. His first encounter with it was not a particularly happy one.
I gave him the manuscript, which was far from being finished, during one of his visits to Warsaw. A few days later he told me gently, though with his perpetually present severity or sharpness in the tortuous background, “I’d advise you to drop this. You should go back to the other genre, from the Recollections of Adolescence, which you mastered so brilliantly. I don’t think this should be published.”
A cold shiver ran down my spine.
No one besides him had read this novel, into which I’d put so much work. Bruno was the first. I trusted him. And it should not be forgotten that Ferdydurke was a venture into virgin territory, an attempt to discover new lands, to carve out new pathways—in a word, a risky endeavor that could not be fully under control. Damn it! Perhaps it really was without value? Two years of labor! So much hope!
I was close to throwing it in the trash. But I summoned up enough heroism to keep on pushing my barrow. A year or so later the book was ready and I sent one of the first copies to Bruno in Drohobycz. A miracle occurred. In the course of a single day I received several telegrams from him—because as he read, he kept running to the post office to send me new compliments. Then, when he came to Warsaw, a timid and soft-spoken Schulz delivered a lecture at the Writers Union in which, without especially raising his voice, he informed the gathered artists that a sun had arisen to extinguish all the stars. Well, well! The audience began to protest, and there was almost a scandal.
And yet we debuted together—and the genre of our writing made us rivals—and he was ten years older than I was! Such unselfishness is a rarity amongst writers.
One day he took me to visit Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. And so it was that Witkiewicz, Schulz, and I—three people endeavoring to lead Polish literature in new directions—finally met in person.
*
I must contend with the fact that this memoir of mine from Poland is intended not only for those who are familiar with Polish literature but also for a broader audience; this makes it difficult to write about certain matters that were vital for me at the time, yet because of their complicated character are not always accessible to the uninitiated. Such an uninitiated person may never have heard of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, of Bruno Schulz, or of me either; for we made up a group of very difficult writers who were not especially popular and who stood in opposition to Polish literary life. Nevertheless it is time, two decades later, for the uninitiated to learn that this group of ours exerted a considerable influence on Polish art, and today has the greatest chance of all Polish prose of being known and appreciated in Europe and in the world. This is already history, in the past, and so I should be permitted to speak of it objectively and without false modesty.
Yet was this in fact a group? We were linked much more by public opinion than by connections amongst ourselves. Bruno and I were not close with Witkacy; and in essence, aside from the enthusiasm that the big-hearted Bruno lavished on me, skepticism and distance held sway amongst us. I didn’t believe in Witkiewicz’s art, whereas for him I was too much of a milksop, and he held no great expectations for me. As for Bruno, both Witkacy and I treated his writings with a certain reserve, and in Warsaw circles he had much more ardent admirers.
As I mentioned, Bruno took me to Witkacy’s. We marched up to some floor off the courtyard of a building on Bracka Street. We rang the bell; I was somewhat on edge after hearing the stories going round about the eccentricities and extravagances of this man, who was gifted with such an outstanding mind. And here in the opened door there appeared an immense dwarf who began to grow before our eyes: It was Witkacy, who had opened the door from a squatting position and was slowly standing up. He liked practical jokes like this! I, on the other hand, did not find them amusing. From the very first moment Witkacy fatigued me and bored me. He was never at rest, always highly strung, tormenting himself and others with his perpetual playacting, his craving to shock and to draw attention to himself, forever cruelly and painfully playing with people. All these shortcomings, which I shared, I now observed as in a distorting mirror, turned monstrous and inflated to apocalyptic proportions.
He started to show us his “atrocity museum,” the highlights of which included something he identified as the dried tongue of a newborn child, some hair that had allegedly belonged to Bejlis, and a letter from a nymphomaniac that was indeed revoltingly licentious.
I said, “Sir, please stop showing us these things! They’re unseemly!”
He gazed at me intently.
“Unseemly?” he asked.
He was somewhat taken aback. And I had once again been overcome by my mania for being an artist and a Bohemian in the homes of the God-fearing gentry, but a member of the landed gentry and even of the nobility amongst Bohemians, intellectuals, and artists. Unseemly! It must have been years since this smoker of hashish and goodness knows what else, this morphine addict, megalomaniac, schizophrenic, paranoiac, jokester, cynic, pervert, Dadaist, and pseudo-madman had heard such naivety. Unseemly! For my part this was an instinct for self-defense; I knew that if I didn’t stand up to Witkacy from the beginning he would devour me, dominate me, tie me to his chariot. He was incapable of being with people on an even footing. He had to be the luminary; if in company he ceased even for a second to be the center of attention, he would begin to languish. And so I was under no illusions and knew that if I didn’t succeed in playing with this man, he would be the one playing with me. But what could I say to him that would truly take him by surprise? Then that sanctimonious word of the bourgeoisie and the gentry popped into my head: “unseemly.”
And thus our roles were established: With Witkacy, I was always the representative of good manners and rural common sense. I confess, moreover, that I didn’t do a good job of this at all. I was also prepared at any moment to sever relations with him; I knew that he often took offense and often offended others, and I decided not to tolerate this and to put an end instantly to our entire acquaintance if the need arose. It’s truly bizarre that despite all this, our relations persisted for several years—perhaps because we communed better through our books than in person, and because we did in fact have a little respect for one another.
I rarely had the opportunity to observe Witkacy with Schulz, and I don’t know much about their relations; but I imagine that Bruno, intense and as it were hardened, had even less to say to him than I did. That was actually the worst of it: Like a despotic ruler, that arch-egotist could not abide anyone who was someone; he surrounded himself with mediocrities, serfs, adulators, acolytes, even abominable scribblers, so long as they lay at his feet. I recall one season in Zakopane when Witkacy paraded around at the head of a veritable throng of such woebegone losers—it was a sight as embarrassing as it was irritating.
Nevertheless, let us try to define what it was that, despite all these contrasts and personal animosities, we had in common, and what constituted our worth. In my view, it was our desire to overcome Polish parochialism, to sail out onto the broadest waters. We lived for Europe and the world, in contrast to local stars such as Kaden-Bandrowski, Goetel, Boy-Żeleński, or Tuwim, who were a hundred times more Polish, better adapted to local readers, and hence more famous. We, for instance, knew the value of originality, and not on a local but a universal scale. We were looking for humanity as such, not local humanity, Polish humanity. We approached art as people versed in the boldest foreign techniques and concepts, ready for anything so long as we could seize the bull by the horns. We were more rigorous, colder, harsher, more dramatic, and also infinitely freer, because we had renounced many constraining loves.
This was our strength, yet also our weakness—for our shortcomings stood out all the more distinctly in light of the great tasks we set ourselves. It’s perhaps not so difficult to become something of value within the nation; but to become someone in the world requires an uncommon effort. It often happens that a tiny fault renders the best machine ineffective, all the more when the machine is a precise one. Thus, Witkiewicz’s intelligence was outstanding, his courage, persistence, relentlessness were magnificent; but I think he lacked a sense of immediate effect. Too often he was a theorist unaware that he bored people and annoyed them; he had no ability to interact with a living person rather than with abstraction, theory, form, and that drove him to stiffness, affectedness, even at times to cheap tricks. Schulz, on the other hand, was too confined by his perversions and his art, as if in an ivory tower; he probably had too much respect for art and was unable to enjoy it from a position of superiority. The form he had elaborated constrained him to such a degree that he was afraid to go a single step beyond it. My defects are not worth mentioning here; I’ll have occasion more than once to return to them. Suffice it to say that all my inner work involved evading them—I wrote despite, to spite, my own indolence.
Witkacy the demon met a demonic end. Escaping from the Bolsheviks during the last war, he took poison in some forest. Nor was Schulz spared by his intimate, masochistic relations with suffering and pain: During the war, as a Jew he found himself in a concentration camp, but he was protected by a certain German who held a high-ranking position and was enchanted by Bruno’s brilliant drawings. But another German fell out with Bruno’s guardian and out of resentment [rest of text probably missing].
*
I was afraid in Poland. True, there was no particular threat; the borders of the state were fixed, foreign policy was tranquil, internal affairs were more or less in order, Piłsudski’s government had a strong foundation for the long term; and yet it was like sitting on a powder keg. I’m speaking for myself. I think the only cause of this unease of mine was the fact that I felt we belonged to the East, that we were part of Eastern and not Western Europe. Yes; neither Catholicism, nor our idiosyncratic attitude to Russia, nor the links our culture had with Rome and Paris—none of this could do anything to combat the Asiatic destitution that was consuming us from below. Our entire culture was a flower pinned to a peasant’s sheepskin coat. And what could the upper echelons do about it, even if they were to renounce utterly their egotism and were to be inspired by the most sublime intentions? Could our gentry, our industry, our intelligentsia make an impression on a peasant, or on a provincial town wallowing in mud? The financing of radical reforms was far beyond our capabilities. No one could do anything. Grousing about the people of that time, accusing them of failing to evince the necessary initiative, is in my view nonsensical. Poland was a young state taking its first steps. Europe was still in disorder; if one wished to avoid revolution, it was necessary to patch the holes any way one could, to play for time, and wait till the progress of organization and civilization in the world offered more favorable circumstances. As far as revolution was concerned, it was hard to delude oneself into thinking otherwise. It would have meant the ruin of everything that had been accomplished, the loss of independence, and the rule of brutal, uncontrollable forces that held no respect whatsoever for humankind. Yet there was hope that the country would pull itself up and become part of the Western system of prosperity.
But let me repeat what I said earlier: the Poland that was born out of the First World War was a land of paralyzed people. The most vital elements were condemned to provisionality and vegetativeness. Everything was put off from one day to the next; everyone was temporizing till the world settled down, the state was consolidated, and there appeared some room for maneuver. The atmosphere of wait-and-see also dominated in literature; it seemed as if Polish writers preferred not to speak more emphatically until they were certain of their national fate.
I rebelled [probable gap in the text] I refused to accept a waiting role and, seeing that such a role was imposed by the collectivity, I refused to link my fate to that of the collectivity. Some may condemn such a position, but let us agree that at times—I’m not speaking about myself—a rebel of this sort striving for unrestricted freedom is worth more to his homeland than those who meekly submit to their destiny. “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth”: I applied those words of Galileo to relations in Poland, and it occurred to me that in order to move something in Poland one needed a place to stand outside of Poland.
Outside of Poland? But where? Where could I stand?
I placed no trust in faiths, doctrines, ideologies, institutions. Thus I could stand only upon my own feet. But I was a Pole, molded by Polishness, living in Poland. And so I needed to look deeper for my “self,” in the place where it was no longer Polish but simply human.
After I finished the comedy Princess Ivona, which was published in Skamander but which due to its “modernness” had no chance of finding its way onto the stage, I began work on a novel; I had no inkling that it would end up being titled Ferdydurke. I started this project in a strange, divided state of mind. Within me there swirled ambitions and painful grudges; I was sore and vengeful and wanted to prove myself, but at the same time common sense—which fortunately had never abandoned me—told me that I shouldn’t measure my strengths according to my intentions, but rather my intentions in light of my strengths. And so I began to sketch the thing out as a regular satire, nothing more, which would permit me to make a show of my humor and perhaps—this I dreamed of—to equal Antoni Słonimski, whose jokes I admired.
Such were my horizons as I wrote the first thirty or forty pages. But a few scenes came out more powerfully, or perhaps more strangely. In them, the satire turned into a grotesquery that was utterly unrestrained, preposterous, nightmarish—an entirely different sort of thing than Słonimski’s humor. I decided to maintain the whole in this spirit; I went back, started again from the beginning, and thus, slowly, there emerged a certain style that was to absorb my more essential sufferings and rebellions. I mention this because it’s usually in such a way—during the process of “improving” the text to match certain more successful passages—that form is created in literature.
I worked hard—six hours a day.
I think that it was at this time I came to know Jerzy Andrzejewski, who had just brought out his first book. We met in one of the cafés, the Ipsa or the ńiemiańska. But Andrzejewski felt ill at ease at my table; between us there was too great a difference in temperament, experiences, and upbringing.
When he first joined us I turned to Otwinowski and said, “So then, Mr. Otwinowski, tell us what impression Mr. Andrzejewski makes on you.”
This system of mine for bringing people together and breaking the ice didn’t always work. Otwinowski was disconcerted; eventually he muttered some compliments: that Andrzejewski was intelligent, pleasant, sincere. I interrupted him and asked him to spare us the good qualities, but rather to focus on the shortcomings, which were much more interesting. I knew that this maneuver was irritating, but Andrzejewski’s reaction exceeded my expectations: Instead of shrugging it off with a laugh, he scowled and stiffened, and I sensed coldness and distance between us. A sense of humor certainly wasn’t his strong suit. But in this case it may have been more that he couldn’t abide being made the subject of conversation. He was as ambitious as he was sensitive; his personality was in a state of perpetual threat, and everywhere he felt that people were plotting against him.
When he left, we began a serious discussion of his good and bad sides. Someone said that “he’ll never succeed in being dramatic because he never stops being dramatic.” Reading Andrzejewski’s work in later years, I was struck by the accuracy of this observation, which at first glance seemed paradoxical. Black ceases to be black when one looks through dark glasses. Andrzejewski never seized the richness of life’s colors; he was attuned to one color, one key, a minor one, and this deprived his vision of authenticity.
He had another defect that could already be seen in all his reactions: He was one of those who were incapable of walking without a cane. He couldn’t take a single step without relying on an ideal, an ideology, standards, or inferred norms of behavior; he was a moralist, but not a free and, one might say, “natural” one, but one who was “principled.” Without a signpost he could not move. This man truly did need God; he wasn’t created for life in a world without order. But his lack of straightforwardness took its revenge on him, making his writing too rigid and even artificial, depriving it of originality.
Who knows if he would not have been a much greater writer if he hadn’t left my table back then. Once again I must indicate that this is not arrogance speaking; I only mean that my world was a necessary complement to his world, and I was a natural ally in his struggle with his own stiffness. But he believed the applause that proclaimed him a “serious” artist.
*
When I met Andrzejewski he was close to Stanisław Piasecki, the editor of the weekly Prosto z mostu, and his group. Many young writers and poets were attracted to Prosto z mostu, not because they were nationalists, but because they simply couldn’t come to terms with Wiadomości Literackie, which was edited by Grydzewski in what was called in those days a Masonic-liberal manner. Andrzejewski was one of those who need principles, guiding ideas, a closely defined moral code; he lacked the flexibility to rely on sense, instinct, ordinary goodness, and high-mindedness that doesn’t arise from theory. He was already preparing himself for the role of moralist—a Catholic moralist in the deeper, perhaps Conradian style. It was no surprise that he was at odds with Wiadomości.
I also had my disagreements with Grydzewski and his influential weekly. I’ll say frankly that in my view, though Grydzewski’s intelligence was sharp and quick, it was not sufficiently penetrating or profound to have the necessary understanding of a literature as difficult as mine. In saying this I don’t mean to say that my works were brilliant, only that because of their desire for newness and originality they were much harder to evaluate. Or perhaps Grydzewski wasn’t to blame so much as his entourage: those various friends and confidants who whispered in his ear, telling him what was good and what was bad. If I had made friends with the Skamandrists—if I had circulated their jokes—if I’d paid visits to the editorial offices of Wiadomości and genuflected before Boy-Żeleński—things would no doubt have looked otherwise, since Grydzewski’s entire show was run according to personal likes and dislikes. But I was galled by the commanding tone that Grydzewski assumed, especially toward us younger writers. He once telephoned me, and as it often took me some time to pick up the phone, he roared at me: “Why does one have to wait so long for you, Mr. Gombrowicz?” I replied, emphasizing every word, “I’m sorry, I was on the toilet.”
Shares on the literary stock market were a political game of warring coteries, intrigues, and everything but art and literature. Someone suspected of even mild anti-semitism could not be backed by Wiadomości; and it was my misfortune that the hero of one of my short stories was born of a Polish father and a Jewish mother. This was enough for me to be showered with praise by Adolf Nowaczyński, a pathological Jew-hater; and Nowaczyński’s praises were enough for cold winds to blow from the direction of Wiadomości. I was utterly innocent: In the story in question racial issues in the everyday sense of the word were of no interest to me; I had a great number of Jewish friends and had never engaged in anti-semitism. But what was the innocence of an artist when faced with the political fury of editors? As a result Wiadomości never properly recognized me in literature, restricting itself to “positive” but measured reviews; I imagine that Grydzewski must be kicking himself today, now that my books have acquired prestige throughout Europe.
But the lack of support from Wiadomości didn’t send me into the arms of Piasecki. What irked me in Piasecki was not so much his nationalism or even his “fascism” as his dull-mindedness and his vulgar nature. He didn’t have an ounce of art in him, and had no flair for such things; he was a politician, and one of that—for me most unpleasant—kind who operate “in culture,” on the borderline between politics and art. He sought to turn writers and artists into a political force, and he actually managed to gather about himself a circle which was very second-rate yet also loud, even clamorous; that whole undertaking of Piasecki’s meant the lowering of our already far from lofty position by at least one floor. He courted me too to begin with, especially because he couldn’t figure out just what I was: He had never read anything of mine, and he had heard rumors that I was a free agent. But these advances ended when at his request I gave him an excerpt from Ferdydurke just before the book came out so he could publish it in his weekly. When he read it he was dumbfounded; he snapped his fingers and, instead of printing the extract, he declared war on me. I remember I was returning to Warsaw from Zakopane on the train one time when I noticed that the lady sitting opposite me in the compartment was engrossed in an extensive front-page article in Prosto z mostu entitled “Picking One’s Teeth.” I sensed that this was about me; when she had finished reading I asked to look at her paper, and it turned out that almost the entire issue was devoted to me; aside from this article by Piasecki, which ripped me to pieces, there were further malicious comments on the second page, a disparaging column on the third, and on the fourth I believe a letter to the editor against slander and libel. In this campaign against me, Piasecki’s most powerful weapon was the nationalist-Catholic critic Jan Emil (if I remember correctly) Skiwski, of whom Słonimski used to say that his was the most noble of Polish names since it not only ended but also began with “ski.” During the last war this Skiwski fell in with the Germans and wrote propaganda for them in the gutter press, because of which he had to scarper from Poland afterward; to the best of my knowledge he’s living in Switzerland at present. He was a dangerous foe: one of those critics who would never amount to anything, being devoid of sensitivity or intuition, but who are highly persuasive when they lend their services to some doctrine or ideal and act as the mouthpiece for someone else’s profundity and wisdom. He was by nature a teacher, a moralist, educator of the nation, and even its savior; such things are highly profitable in Poland—and thus he had a readership.
But Andrzejewski remained the apple of Piasecki’s eye right up until the war: He was a Catholic, a moralist too, an educator, anti-Masonic, a fine writer, a pure-blooded Pole ... everything as it should be … and I don’t think Piasecki ever gave up on Andrzejewski, though their relations gradually became more distant. Andrzejewski, on the other hand, for tactical reasons avoided conflict with the editor of Prosto z mostu, but in our circles in the café he made no secret of the fact that he was filled with ever greater distaste at the methods and tricks of that group, and especially their brutal disregard for purely artistic values.
Once he even took a stand on my behalf in an incident which I’ll recount not because it was significant in itself but because it was typical of my unrest at that time. I went with young Paweł Zdziechowski to the country, to his parents’ property in Poznań province, and we were soon joined there by Witold Małcużyński. I spent a couple of weeks there, and was treated most hospitably. Andrzejewski, who was a friend of Paweł’s, also visited. Our time was spent in conversation and music. Upon my return to Warsaw I wrote a few pieces for the Kurier Poranny about my Poznań interlude. But I was so filled with a strange anger, and I carried so much bitterness on the subject of country houses, beginning with my own, that I was unable to refrain from certain malicious comments.
Here I must add that according to my views of that time, a so-called social faux pas was a highly creative element in art; I believed that an artist afraid of impropriety, tastelessness, scandal, was worth little, and submission to social forms was not good for those who create form. And so, knowing full well that what I wrote was not proper, for this very reason I wrote it. Those few spiteful remarks, not addressed to anyone in particular by the way, would have disappeared without an echo, had they not been seized upon by Piasecki, who was already out to cook my goose. A note appeared in Prosto z mostu saying that Gombrowicz is an arrogant and impertinent fellow, because he was invited to the country by Mr. and Mrs. X and repaid them by defaming them, et cetera, et cetera. Prosto z mostu was not known for its subtlety of expression; the whole affair immediately became serious and most sordid. In fact, I accepted all this with philosophical calm, since I was accustomed to such things. I wrote a few conciliatory words to Mr. Zdziechowski and expressed my regrets; but in the evening, at the Zodiak café we discussed the matter more extensively and I explained to those present that, whatever my misdeed might have been in terms of ordinary decency, for me it had a deeper meaning: It was an experiment, a conscious transgression of form, and so in any case Piasecki’s interpretation was false.
It was then that I first heard from Andrezejewski’s lips a bitter and harsh appraisal of Piasecki’s methods; he also stressed the duplicity and vileness of this politics that was invading art. I believe he was franker than he was later, when he himself was harnessed to a political yoke.
*
Have I already mentioned the visits to Zofia Nałkowska’s?
Her home was one of the centers of literary life in Warsaw. Soon after the publication of my first book I was introduced to that salon, whose principal adornment was a palm tree in an immense tub, cared for with maternal solicitude by Madame Zofia, who admired the odd shapes made by nature.
Madame Zofia, the only female member of the Academy of Literature, would take a seat on the sofa and would lead the conversation like the distinguished matrons of prewar times: I was reminded of the “five o’clock teas” that my mother used to hold, or receptions at the canonesses’. But there was no question that the intelligence and refinement of this remarkable woman were reflected in the level of the conversation, and were more than adequate for coping with the truly varied elements that took part in these discussions. I often admired the skill with which this lady was able to raise a spark even from notorious recluses and stutterers, and those known for their taciturnity and their lack of polish. Her social talents broke down only with Witkiewicz: When that giant with the mien of a cunning schizophrenic came into view, Madame Zofia would cast desperate glances at her confidants; for from that moment the conversation would go to hell, and Witkacy would take the floor. That man would start to languish if he ceased even for a second to be the center of interest: It had to be either that people were speaking about him, or to him, or that he himself was speaking. He couldn’t abide any other arrangement, and when at times, thanks to a mighty effort on the part of the hostess, some exchange of views was achieved on the side, Witkacy immediately began to grow so intensely bored, and to be so evidently silent, that everyone felt as if they had committed a mortal sin. And it must be added that Witkacy was not one of those who simply say what they have to say. There was nothing more contorted, bizarre, or difficult than his manner of speaking, which was calculated for effect, always on the borderline of playacting, tomfoolery, and circus tricks. It was without a doubt intelligent, but terrifyingly cold, cynical, monotonous, a kind of madness perhaps reminiscent of that contemporary clown Salvador Dali.
Fortunately he was an infrequent guest at Nałkowska’s. The range of her acquaintances was extremely broad. It included the political world, especially Piłsudski’s camp, with whom she was close, since the Marshal himself was a rather close friend of hers—in fact, Piłsudski once even stayed with her for a few days, during the coup I believe. She recalled her guest with great admiration, though also not without a certain frisson—on several occasions she told me about his oppressive personality, and how it overwhelmed all those around him. She would say in surprise: “When he was here I would walk about on tiptoe in my own apartment; even in the furthest room I didn’t dare speak loudly, though I was well aware he couldn’t hear me.”
Aside from Piłsudski’s people, and government and political circles, there was of course literature and art. Karol Szymanowski, for instance, who regrettably did not find my little book of stories entirely to his liking; but above all women, whose relations with Nałkowska were rather complicated and, I might say, perverse: for she was not unduly fond of them, preferring male society, while on the other hand she had a sense of female solidarity, which obliged her to “spread her sheltering wings,” as Breza maliciously put it.
The most onerous feature of Madame Zofia’s salon, however, were some strange characters, for the most part gray and terribly inconspicuous, neither flesh, fish, nor good red herring, occasionally real oddballs, who had come from goodness knows where. A good few of them, I suspect, the elegant hostess owed to Bogusław Kuczyński, a young man of perhaps twenty-five who was a friend of hers. Kuczyński was a beginning author and had published a book entitled Women on the Way, which was so economical and severe in its language that it couldn’t count on a wide readership. But it was precisely such works, strange, marginal, breaking out of norms, that most attracted Nałkowska’s lively intellect. She was probably also rather attracted by Kuczyński himself, a handsome young fellow, though extremely untalkative, of whom someone coined the expression that “it’s as if he were gagged.” He was touchy, nervous, dramatic, and looked like a true martyr. He spoke quietly, elaborately, and with difficulty, as if tormented by the fact that he was unable to express his deepest inner truth. He was perpetually on edge and constantly “experiencing” something, though it was never clear what.
It was Bogusław the Gagged, who was a friend of mine and of the other young folk, that dragged along to Madame Zofia’s a mixed bunch of cranks as if just in case ... who knew, maybe something would come of them. And it was this that Nałkowska reveled in most of all—in sniffing out talent, unearthing something of value, even of the kind you need a magnifying glass to see. She would be brought a manuscript by some poet no one had ever heard of, and three days later he was being discussed over tea. And often her knack for discovering the new brought results: It was she who discovered Schulz, promoted Rudnicki and Breza, supported Piętak, nor was I refused her aid and advice. It was hardly surprising that young folk were drawn to her. She in turn was drawn to young people; she was amazingly vital for her age, and she aroused the envy of other women, who would say sneeringly, “Literature conserves ...”
Was she a snob? That was a charge that stuck to her; but I personally was never convinced by the idea of her alleged snobbery. She liked receiving guests; she liked elegance, and she herself was an elegant and even worldly woman. And these qualities, so ordinary in Paris, became almost indecent and provocative in certain circles in Warsaw. And I suspect that if she’d been less of a “leftist” she would not have been accused so readily of snobbery—for it was only against the background of her leftism that Madame Zofia’s exquisite manners stood out particularly glaringly. In general it must be said that this woman belonged neither in Warsaw nor in Poland; her place was Paris, or in any case western Europe.
This was a point of especial interest to me—for I too felt out of place in Poland, and I leaned toward Europe with all my being. But in a short time I realized that Nałkowska’s Europe was not my Europe. I wasn’t unduly fond of her books... and there arose a situation that was even a little deceitful—not for the first time, alas, and not with her alone—since I couldn’t reciprocate her abundant, praiseful interest with even a single more enthusiastic word. Because when it came down to it, I could not abide such Europeans as Nałkowska, who acquired Europe’s savoir vivre yet avoided any essential confrontation with the West. In my understanding this was an imitation of Europe, and not genuine contact with it.
If Nałkowska had been more strongly, more painfully in touch with the realities of Poland ... If she’d followed in the footsteps of Chopin, who conquered Europe with his Polishness, that is, with his own personal authentic reality... But she felt closer to Szymanowski, who, despite his great talent, never managed to find his own personal, and thus national, reality—he exploited it esthetically, but he never conquered it spiritually. And thus, Nałkowska was more Europe’s ambassador in Poland than Poland’s representative in Europe, and in my view this was not the best method for transforming oneself into a genuine European.
I remember one walk I took with her in the Łazienki Park. We strolled along the autumnal paths and finally sat down on a bench. She was enraptured at the sight of a tree that was a few yards from us. It was one of those cold yet passionate exaltations that she experienced with stones, fish, plants. It started with various exclamations such as, “Just look at that line ... the embodiment of slenderness,” and it ended in comparisons that almost belonged in the salon: “My, that tree is stylish! It’s like a fine lady!” For some reason I was angry with her—perhaps I’d had enough of these urbanities of hers—and in the end I said, not without a dose of sarcasm, “I see you’re investing your entire soul in that tree!” Instead of being offended, she grew melancholy and replied, “It’s true; in my case beauty not only makes my life harder, it also makes it harder for me to find my relation to life.”
Such words may well encapsulate the drama of this exceptional woman.
*
On Zofia Nałkowska’s name day her apartment on Marszałkowska Street, near Unii Lubelskiej Square, was always filled with massive numbers of guests. In 1935, on that day of St. Sophia (or perhaps a day close to it), a huge crowd had gathered—colonels, generals, ministers, editors, writers, members of parliament, painters, the theater world—one could hardly squeeze through the throng.
The party was just reaching its climax when suddenly something happened. I was unable at first to figure out the reason for this abrupt yet so pronounced change; around me, by the buffet, people were conversing with glasses and small plates in their hands. But in the general hum of conversation something seemed to have broken down.
All at once I saw some woman writer—maybe Szelburg-Zarembina, or perhaps Melcer-Rutkowska—crying as she left the drawing room. Her face was bathed in tears. What was it? Could someone have insulted her?
Then two more women left, sobbing loudly, followed by several men wearing dramatic expressions. And all around, silence began to take the place of the clamor of the reception. Again a number of people moved toward the door, hurriedly donning their coats.
At last I understood: Piłsudski. It had been known for several days that his condition was serious.
By now everyone was leaving, exchanging quiet and hurried goodbyes; and since the presidential palace was close by, Madame Zofia’s guests ran off in that direction. I followed them, with Adolf Rudnicki and a few others. Scarcely two or three cars stood in front of the palace, and there was only a handful of people waiting outside the gates—the news had not yet spread around the city, and we were among the first to have heard. The white façade of the Belweder palace, clearly visible in the light of the street lamps, was mysterious and silent.
All at once a procession of Cadillacs began to drive into the courtyard—it was the government, led by Prime Minister Skladkowski, reporting to the Marshal for the last time.
In today’s tempestuous era everyone has had their share of historic moments, myself included. After all, I’d been present at the end of the First World War, the rebirth of Poland, the Battle for Warsaw, the May Coup, and so on. But at such times, I always felt something like a revolt against history, and couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that I was nothing, a piece of straw blown in the wind, and that everything was taking place outside of me. This can probably be ascribed to my fierce individualism, which is beyond my control, since I was born with it and will die with it. I would be lying if I claimed that the Marshal’s death did not distress me profoundly. With him a certain period of our existence also died; the country, deprived of his firm hand, was stepping into an Unknown bristling with perils. But seeing the cream of the Polish intelligentsia gathered in front of the Belweder like a covey of partridges, humble, trembling, terrified, immobilized, as if it weren’t a man who had died but a superman, irritated me in a manner as unexpected as it was acute. By all means, let the military, the civil servants, the ordinary citizens react like this ... but intellectuals, philosophers, artists? Where was their strength, their maturity? Were they not even slightly more stable than those others, the subordinates? Were they too expecting someone to take care of them and lead them—that someone higher and more powerful would look after the machine in which they were no more than little cogs?
I gazed in exasperation at the pale faces of some of my fellow writers and said aloud to no one in particular, “What nice cars!”
It isn’t hard to imagine the effect. The more kindly disposed explained to those less sympathetic that I was a bit crazy and a bit of an actor, that it was a pose, that I was pretending to be cynical and tactless. Yet I wasn’t so crazy in those days, and maybe Piłsudski was not so offended at my insubordination as he lay on his catafalque ... he who did indeed like obedience, but also valued dignity, freedom, and pride in Poles. It was just that at the time I was incapable of explaining these outbursts of mine, which were colored more by idealism than cynicism. I was a beginning writer who had carved out his own genre of imaginative prose but did not yet know how to write simply and accessibly about what pained him and troubled him.
Piłsudski! It’s not my place to evaluate his policies—though I’m inclined to think that even if Poland had been led at the time by Churchill, or Mussolini, or even Napoleon and Talleyrand together, they would not have been able to accomplish much more, since the potential of Polish politics was hugely restricted by the geographical location of this small country in the convulsive heart of a Europe already sick with all the illnesses that were soon to break out. Piłsudski did whatever could be done, in whatever way it could be done; and his realism, boldness, and courage stood in sharp contrast to the cowardly pacifism of the over-smart bourgeoisie of France or England with their Briand, their League of Nations, and their Locarno. As an artist, I was enthralled and entertained by the Marshal’s style—that entire characteristic grand, delectable, colorful manner of his, and his unmistakable, delectable greatness. It was at the same time both perfectly Polish and utterly his own. We writers often spent hours discussing this astounding figure, relishing it and attempting to decipher its secrets. Yet in these conversations sentiment prevailed, and often respect made analysis impossible; at such times Piłsudski’s greatness almost always remained beyond question, like something that has been established once and for all.
“You talk about him as if he’d been ’conferred’ upon you,” I once said. “As if History had given you the gift of a great man. And since they say one shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you don’t ask where this greatness of his comes from and why.”
And indeed, in the attitude of Polish intellectuals toward Piłsudski there was a great deal of convention and even clichés. It was common knowledge that Poland sometimes had great individuals; well then, he was one of them and that was all there was to it. But such alacrity in adoration and obedience was not becoming in the elite of the nation. What’s appropriate for a soldier is not always recommended for an intellectual. The chair of the Cabinet, Sławoj, standing stiffly to attention before the Marshal, really did not represent the highest accomplishments of Polish reason. And that romantic, sentimental, naive helplessness of the Polish intelligentsia in relation to Piłsudski harmed him himself—for Piłsudski was the first victim of his own legend, and Piłsudski may never have impressed anyone as much as he impressed himself.
Naturally I’m not forgetting that public debate on this issue was impossible at the time, not so much because of the reaction of the authorities, but because the Marshal had admirers who were as ardent as they were ready for a scrap. True, I wasn’t always fully aware of these taboos. It was thanks to Nałkowska that before it was too late I removed a humorous poem from Ferdydurke that parodied the legions’ song “The First Brigade.” She raised the roof: “Have you gone mad?! This is asking for trouble.” Luckily the text had not yet been sent to the printer’s, so there was still time to patch the passage over without difficulty. But, though anything that concerned the legend of Piłsudski and the legions was beyond the pale of free commentary in the press or in books, in conversation one could say whatever one liked.
This freedom, however, was not taken advantage of in the literary world. Neither the Skamandrists, who were after all so quick to poke fun, nor critics like Boy-Żeleński or Irzykowski, nor the left, nor even the circles associated with the Kurier Warszawski, nor the right-wing national democrats led by Nowaczyński. On various occasions the Marshal was attacked for one or another aspect of his policies; but in my experience it never happened that his very greatness itself was subject to discussion and analysis in those last years of his rule. The catchword that “Poland has had great men and the great man of Poland is now Piłsudski” had taken root even in the subconscious of his enemies.
I won’t deny that he may well have been great. For me it was not his greatness that chafed, but the smallness of those who submitted to it so eagerly. I had nothing whatsoever against the masses for following him blindly, but I was perturbed by the ease with which the leading classes of society renounced their right to criticism and skepticism, to—and this is the appropriate word—scrutiny.
*
Something should also be said about the women of those distant times. My mother and sister were virtuous believers, “women of principle” as the phrase was then, and thus the representatives of the fair sex who visited our home were known more for their virtues than their flirtatiousness—those various girlfriends of my sister, Rena, from the Society of Landed Ladies and the Catholic Mission, who mostly devoted themselves to an assortment of philanthropic activities and were most uninterested in coquetry. My brothers, who were older than I was, felt wronged, because normally a sister’s friends constitute natural prey for her brothers; and so they had a rather hostile and malicious attitude to these friends and to the “principles” they worshipped.
Yet what a difference there was between my mother’s faith and my sister’s—as if they were two separate languages! My mother’s Catholicism was spontaneous, natural, almost rash in its naturalness—it was the air that she breathed without being aware of it and without any effort. True, she liked to broach various theological issues, but she did so with an indolence that proved she was quite unprepared for it. Here the ideal was manifest in a certain way of being, and my mother was a devout Catholic just as she was a Pole and a member of the landed gentry.
My sister, on the other hand, was difficult in her faith, intent, concentrated; it was what we would call today an “existential” Catholicism that showed how very difficult life had become over the course of a single generation. It was already a modern Catholicism. There is no doubt, incidentally, that she had the strongest character of all of us. Besides, she was powerfully drawn to logic, precision, scientific objectivity, and it was not for nothing that she had studied mathematics. Her faith too was as much reasoned as it was emotional, but it was almost completely devoid of joy, at least the kind that manifests itself easily on the outside; and it was almost dramatic in its stubbornness. Often, observing those two women, I would reflect with a certain disquiet on the kind of severity and coldness which became characteristic of our generation—and which I perceived also in myself and my literary and nonliterary peers. These were signs in heaven and earth that announced the birth of new and so much tougher times.
I don’t mean to say by this that all those Catholic women of the new kind were equally categorical and profound; quite the opposite, they included a considerable mixture of modern intellectualism with the former ease, and boundaries were not strictly set; and yet amongst them there appeared a gravity that broke through the platitudes they had inherited. It was just that at times the combination of these elements created truly comic effects, which we brothers greeted with gales of laughter. For it must be confessed that that still inept gravity, that ardor which could not express itself because it was too timid and mute, or which sometimes resorted to bombast—all this sometimes prompted resistance and mockery, and I believe that many a man was alienated from the church by precisely this new emerging style of female Catholicism.
We made fun of these “excesses” in the name of common sense and realism, and often mocked their virtue in exactly the way the Marxists would have done—in other words, demonstrating that it was the fruit of bourgeois pampering, of the comforts that the upper social spheres provide. Such reproaches rarely made any impact on my mother; she rejected them out of hand as originating from a spirit of unbelief and malice—but in young ladies of my sister’s type they found an unexpectedly strong resonance. These young women already knew that beyond “their” world was concealed another, a much fouler reality that it would not be possible to avoid. Their delicacy desperately sought some spiritual fortification which would enable them to face this sinister reality; like well-mannered maidens, they continued to try not to notice certain “dirty facts of life,” but they were already mobilizing their deepest reserves to be able to face them head on, and not to be taken by surprise when the time came to do so.
While older women could see nothing whatsoever wrong with their material wealth, the younger ladies from “good homes” were perpetually accompanied by feelings of guilt. “It’s not my fault I was born into well-off circles,” my sister would defend herself. “We all have to live wherever God has placed us. But my life ought not to be easier than other, less fortunate lives; in any case I ought to live for those other lives. It’s not a matter of getting rid of my possessions, or the values to which a better education gave me access, but of enabling others to have access to them.”
And, faithful to her mathematical inclinations, she would add, “Tell me, is that not logical?”
She remained true to this logic of hers throughout her life. She was hard-working, conscientious, scrupulous, and devoted to charitable work; she strove to maximize the effectiveness of what she did and was modest and quiet as she went about it.
But these more modern Catholic women, for the most part young, were encumbered by the ballast of tradition, of various already outdated conventions, the phraseology of their mothers and aunts, against which they did not wish to rebel too much. These older ladies were often quite unbearable in their naive and oh-so-comfortable grandiloquence. The myth of the Polish woman, guardian of the domestic hearth, representative of the spirit, called upon to inspire the man with said spirit—this myth, created by the literature of Rodziewiczówna and her ilk, was, like anything of poor quality, deeply pernicious. And such a lofty program was far from difficult to implement: The husband earned money or gathered the profits from his estates, and his wife was the “guardian” of ideals that ought not to be looked in the mouth since they were a gift from their esteemed parents and grandparents. How many female guardians and priestesses have I known! They were individuals filled with the best intentions, striving to bring up their husband and children as best as possible, but they were lazy and had no clue about anything, convinced that a knowledge of the ten commandments was all the wisdom they needed. Alas, it became impossible to have any real educative influence when one had not kept up with intellectual and cultural advancements. Yet it was not this that most rankled with younger people, but rather the ever more visible falseness of their position, their tone.
Every writer, even one just beginning, becomes something of a counselor and confessor. A student I knew once admitted to me that he had thought about killing his mother.
“But you were always devoted to her; you loved her,” I observed.
“I don’t deny it,” he replied, sipping his coffee in the small café where we were talking, “but at the same time I can’t stand her. You have no idea how she annoys me! I’m not at all fond of my father, but at least he’s a regular fellow, like everyone else, and doesn’t put on airs. But my mother! She’s an actress of the worst kind: noble, steadfast, suffering. She does nothing but declaim! It’s true that that was exactly why I respected her, even worshipped her; but now it’s exactly why I want to strike her!”
There were many such toxins in these God-fearing families, which incidentally shows how society was rapidly maturing. Poland at that time was a land of dying styles, forms which were being put to death like sick animals ... but these formal dissonances were exactly what I was looking for while I was writing Ferdydurke! It’s not always that the vengefulness of the new generation takes on such a dramatic shape. One of my friends had a bone to pick with one of his aunts, who as guardian and foster mother had disapproved loudly of his engagement with a young lady who wasn’t “suitable” enough. My friend found himself a good-looking streetwalker, taught her so-called salon manners in the course of a few lessons, and then took her under an assumed name to his aunt’s salon. The courtesan apparently behaved magnificently, drinking her tea and eating her petits fours beyond reproach; but it turned out that she had too many acquaintances amongst the gentlemen present. This led to consternation, the consternation to panic, and the panic to scandal, resulting in the ejection not only of the poor woman of the night, but of my friend too.
*
I rarely met with Boy-Żeleński. From time to time I would attend his teas, and I can’t say I enjoyed them: the crowd, the tea-drinking standing up, and the conversation that was so ephemeral you began a sentence with one person and ended it with another. The host himself was too much in demand and constantly being greeted for him to spend much time with anyone.
I had little contact with the women who surrounded him, mostly because this secondhand, feminized Boyism I found not only not attractive, but actually repellent. These were either older women writers who constituted a kind of female general staff of the master, or pretty young women, sometimes actresses or poets, often quite simply girls who were drawn to an environment in which their beauty could exist in a way that was easier and more productive, and without fear. But, strange to relate, in the immediate orbit of Boy-Żeleński the charms of these women seeking an “easier life” were much less alluring; there was something deliberate, something theoretical about them, and this overly stereotypical emancipation was sometimes vexsome.
I must admit, however, that this man achieved great things as far as the normalization of Polish women was concerned. I use the term normalization to refer to the situation that had arisen. I’ve already mentioned the extent to which the older generation of women of the intelligentsia was still burdened by the cheap phraseology that the traditions and literature of the preceding period had fed them—these ladies were almost always a little over the top, if not in one thing then another, always inclined to pursue some “mission” and to speak in the name of “higher principles.” Of course, there would be nothing wrong in all this, were it not for the fact that a lack of intellectual sophistication and a surfeit of naivety rendered them virtually childlike in this sublime role. And as concerns their daughters, who were much better at controlling themselves and who frequently succeeded in deepening their Catholicism, this profound experience of faith turned out badly only in those whose natures were specially designed for it. An ordinary young woman, who didn’t shun entertainment or flirtation and wished to find a husband, tended to feel uncomfortable in such an outsized suit of armor; she would lose her sense of proportion and fail to understand what was expected of her and what her obligations were. To this would be added the glaring discrepancy between the atmosphere of science classes at university or school, where liberalism reigned, and the spirit of severity in which she was immersed at home.
This disequilibrium in women was a great problem for us young people. No one knew what sort of woman he would encounter and what torments he’d have to go through with her. It would seem, for example, that when a girl began to gaze tenderly and playfully at her sweetheart, the latter was entitled to look forward to various pleasant things. But it happened to me—and I think not to me alone—that a certain good-looking blonde flirted with me not to seduce me but for my moral edification! I was twenty-some years old then; we met several times, and she treated me so tenderly that in the end I asked her out on a date.
“Very well,” she whispered, blushing, “but no one can see us!”
I screwed up my courage and suggested that she come to my place. She went pale, then blushed, but agreed.
Yet when she appeared at the appointed time, she didn’t take off her coat and hat.
“You probably imagine goodness knows what about me! But I’m not like that. I’ve come to have a serious talk with you. I want to help you; I can see that you’re in pain.”
And there began a lecture explaining that the road I had taken was not the right one, that she wanted to show me the light, that I lacked ideals, and so on and so forth. I thought to myself that she could have done without this kind of introduction; but to me it smacked of the worst kind of falsehood, and I decided to stick it out in the hope that we’d soon switch to another subject. Nothing of the sort! The lessons in idealism went on and on, and when in the end I asked her if she didn’t think she had misled me, she took offense.
“Who do you take me for! Yes, I was interested in you, but only because you’ve gone astray!”
This exasperating combination of old and new elements, of the modern ease of manner and principles, eroticism and idealism, sex and soul, was a common phenomenon. Polish women are undoubtedly an outstanding example of womankind: intelligent, bold, vigorous, enterprising—but it’s precisely this that inclines them to take command. They want to guide their man, educate him, save him, ennoble him.… He’ll always remain something of a child for them. As for me, in moral matters I still sometimes received those teachings meekly, though deep down I was convinced that in this too I knew better than they did—but when they began opening my soul to beauty and uttering platitudes about art, the writer in me would awake and I’d take a stand.
“For the love of God,” I once said to one such female esthete, “just think about yourself a little! You read virtually nothing. You have no notion of music or painting: You can’t tell Beethoven from Mozart, Brahms from Bach, or Titian from Velasquez; you’ve barely looked at Shakespeare and Goethe—so what are you talking about? Your whole life indicates that you don’t like art and don’t understand it.
Why would you decide to teach someone like me who is immersed in it?”
She answered calmly as anything, “Yes, but you lack ideals and principles.”
Well! To that there was no reply. Principles and ideals took the place of hard work, passion, and expert knowledge. Such arrogance, which absolved one of the need for hard work, was often found amongst those Catholic women, who were convinced they “knew better,” though many a priest combated it by observing correctly that faith ought not to be an encouragement to pride or idleness.
These few examples are enough to make it clear why I charge a considerable percentage of the women of that time with a lack of balance. They were like an untuned musical instrument; they lacked naturalness and a sense of perspective in word and deed. And it was here, in my view, that Boy-Żeleński’s journalism was truly fruitful—independently of the shocking and even scandalous aspect it possessed for many respectable older and younger ladies, it was nevertheless a school of humor, of a sense of realism, of a modern way of coexistence. Boy-Żeleński’s common sense somehow managed to infect even those who regarded him as a demon and, worse, a Mason; it filtered down through his lady friends and acquaintances all the way to the most conservative circles, and it gradually changed women’s ways of being, that form to which I attach such importance, seeing in it as I do the key to so many aches and the secret to so many sicknesses. Through their struggles with him, Boy-Żeleński’s staunchest female opponents became freer, more flexible, and as it were more capable.
A few years before the war, in Zakopane I once took a trip to Hala Gąsienicowa with a group of ladies who had just returned to Poland after living abroad for several years. Many things irritated them, and soon our conversation was teeming with anecdotes and comments illustrating the lack of refinement of Polish women, their awkwardness, their failings, their ineptitude, especially toward men. In this way we reached the hostel on Hala, where there was a small group of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls—a school outing under the supervision of a few female teachers.
Just at that time there appeared an outing of male students from some technical school in Kraków. The encounter of these young people took place so smoothly, without any discord caused by excessive prudery or unruliness—welcoming smiles and friendly greetings materialized so readily and were so engaging—that we in our corner had to confess this new crop was quite different, as if liberated from the hell of dissonances. A very great deal had changed—gone were entire registers of affectation, exaggeration, airs and graces, that whole convulsiveness marking the older generation. Was this Boy-Żeleński’s work? Probably so, but only to a small degree. Something more powerful—the spirit of the times itself—played the biggest part.
*
A certain philosopher, I forget exactly who, classified nations into those that have a feminine culture and those in which masculine culture predominates. This traveler—now I remember, it was a German thinker by the name of Keyserling, who had visited many countries and had become a great expert in national psychology—used to say that determining which cultural group, the masculine or the feminine, a given nation belongs to is the easiest thing in the world. One simply has to observe whose interests are better protected by the customs, laws, and institutions of that nation—those of the man, or those of the woman.
If mores are strict; if a young woman is under the control of her parents; if, in order to go for a walk with the girl you adore, you first have to declare yourself as a suitor, and even then Mama and Papa tread on your heels; if your young man’s ardors can find no outlet, and everything is so masterfully arranged that you feel as if an invisible hand has seized you by the scruff of the neck and is dragging you toward the altar; and if in addition your income and its stability has become a matter of public discussion as the safeguard of hearth and home—then there’s no doubt about it: You are in a country that is in the hands of women and is organized with a view to matrimony.
If, on the other hand, a young bachelor has an easy life; if public opinion is forbearing, laws lenient, and only those men marry who truly feel called upon to do so—then masculine erotic culture is dominant.
Thus, Poland between the wars was for me a country slowly changing its erotic culture from the feminine to the masculine.
I may be wrong—it’s very difficult to make such sweeping judgments about Poland, if only because of the chasm that separates the common people from the intelligentsia—these were always two worlds apart. But in any case the intelligentsia, especially its artistic and intellectual branch, which I knew best, from year to year clearly revealed the growing ascendancy of the man. Ha—it wasn’t just the women artists and writers, but schoolgirls as well! I became convinced of this at first hand when, not long before the war, the girls of the sixth or seventh grade of the Queen Jadwiga Grammar School invited me to a school ball. I was asked because they had, on their own initiative, prepared a performance of my short story “Filidor’s Child Within,” which they’d adapted for the stage, and the ball was held to mark this event. It took place in the villa of one of their number somewhere in Okęcie. When I arrived I found a living room filled with sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls and their various boy-friends and admirers; the element of parents, aunts, and so on had been completely eliminated, leaving the young people in charge. Well then! I’ve found myself at all kinds of strange and spirited parties, but I had never encountered anything like this initiation into fun, vodka, and extravagance.
It started off rather dull and awkward: some desultory conversations, with intermittent laughter. I’d already begun to figure out how I might sneak away, when suddenly someone opened the door to the next room, where there was a buffet, and everyone gradually began to gather around a table bearing various alcoholic drinks. From what followed I recall the impression of an abrupt crescendo, a rapidly growing buzz, rising to the dimensions of a roar—these young people had flung themselves on the vodka. Within five minutes we were all tipsy; I’ve never seen so many people get drunk together so instantly, as if on command. And I of course was among them, and afterward I don’t remember very clearly what happened, though I have vague memories of riding a motorcycle and climbing a tree.
Such parties testified to the marked “militarization” of young ladies’ ways—I call it this since it was the style of the young people from the military schools, the style of the military life. This unruliness amongst minors, which so scandalized their elders, had at the time—at least in the closing years of the period—its own dramatic meaning: war. Its shadow lay on everything; its ominous proximity whispered that life should be enjoyed while it could, before it was overly mixed with death. These teenage girls of the last years before the war had something of the scorn for convention that characterized the young people who a couple of years later were fighting on the streets of Warsaw. “We’re living as if we were about to die,” an inebriated Światek Karpiński once shouted in my ear at some booze-up; and that reflected the atmosphere hanging over Poland even more than over Europe as a whole.
And so if the generation that entered the lists immediately after the First World War was bathed in the great revolution of mores the war had given birth to, the next generation already felt the breath of the new cataclysm—and thus, between two wars young people moved ever further from the thought of marriage, family, or professional work, and entered ever more into the orbit of romance and danger.
As far as this increasing ease of manners is concerned, the difference between us and the West was, I think, that in those countries, which despite everything gave people a greater sense of security, it was more rational, a logical development, whereas in Poland it was darker, more intuitive and more dramatic. Young people in England read Wells and criticized old conceptions in the name of a new scientific, atheistic worldview that gave women the right to free love; in Poland things happened as it were by themselves, because even adolescents out of range of the official rhetoric of the great powers could read the obscure signs of the coming tragedy. Boy-Żeleński at most provided only a small few with a rational foundation; the rest adhered to the new ways not for any reason and not because they were influenced by Hitler’s or Stalin’s theories, but because they were simply afraid of Hitler and Stalin.
As far as I could tell from my restricted point of view, there was no shortage of Polish women whom the switch from feminine to masculine erotic culture suited very well. They felt comfortable within it, and didn’t fear it in the slightest. Polish women are not excessively womanly. On the contrary, they have a good few masculine qualities: Their courage, energy, self-reliance, resourcefulness, their ambition, their desire to lead, their rich mental life and intellectual interests mean that they are far from resembling the “little woman” type often found amongst the Spanish, the Italians, and also frequently the Germans. There can be no question that this category of Polish female was stifled by the narrow role the old style of interaction with men imposed upon them. As I observed older women brought up in the former school, I had a strange impression. They seemed shocked and embarrassed, and they blushed as they recounted what their daughters got up to; yet at the same time it was as if, deep down, in secret, they actually liked it, and it was even apparent that in some way they themselves were living vicariously through their children’s freedom, of which they disapproved.
But I repeat that I do not wish to generalize; I’m only recounting what I observed from my own perspective. And it was a narrow perspective: It included mostly “society” women and those from the artistic world, whereas I had no contact with legions of women from other intellectual and social spheres. I was made plainly aware of this myself in Zakopane once when I made the rather stormy acquaintance of a group of professors from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków who were staying in the same guesthouse that I was. I immediately got into an argument with these professors, and so effectively that one eminent historian seized hold of a chair to hurl at me, so upset was he by my foolish gibes; yet on the other hand I became friends with their children, who were mostly entering upon scientific careers and were studying chemistry, biology, and such subjects. These likable girls and intelligent boys introduced me in Kraków to a sizable crowd of creatures like themselves. These were young ladies who already resembled men in many ways, yet in some way also recalled the women of my mother’s generation, perhaps because they were so self-possessed—yes, they were not thrill-seekers but composed, disciplined women who in some strange way seemed God-fearing, though they were often at odds with the church. But they belonged to a different church—that of science. They submitted to its rigors and from it derived virtue.
*
I personally never knew how to deal with them—I’m talking about women—and with them I always behaved exactly as I should not have. In other words I was uncouth, fantastical, aggressive, ironic, unstable. Of course, much of this was due to my various complexes and inhibitions, but I also owe a lot of it to unpleasant experiences, and the fact that I’d been stung so many times.
In Ferdydurke, the novel I wrote when I was nearing thirty and which was my settling of accounts with the world, there’s a passage about “genteel aunts,” whom I regard as an even worse plague than ordinary family aunts. These genteel aunts were a real nuisance. If I remember Nałkowska with gratitude, it’s because she was one of the very few women writers who didn’t treat me with auntlike indulgence from the heights of her auntlike knowledge of literature. I give a genuine sigh at the thought of the level-headed, penetrating intelligence of that exceptional lady. Others usually regarded me either as an obstreperous little boy, or as a demon, or most often as a poseur who was trying to impress with a forced originality. What was I to do? Explain? Clarify? There wouldn’t have been any point: They would have understood little. These were women who at a pinch could appreciate literature that was already established, valued, and catalogued, but they were utterly helpless when faced with something that deviated from the norm. I took my revenge on them by turning myself into a madman and acting the fool as much as possible, but deep down I hated those indulgent and arrogant matrons, leaders, teachers, and—alas, it often happened—reviewers.
Just as Polish poetry of the time was dominated by men, so the women took over Polish prose. Truly exceptional writers like Schulz or Witkiewicz were considered eccentrics; Kaden-Bandrowski was ever less important; whereas Dąbrowska, Nałkowska, Kossak-Szczucka, Kuncewiczowa, Krzywicka, Naglerowa, or Gojawiczyńska were the providers of novels discussed high and wide in the press and popular with readers. It was not at all bad work, and there sometimes appeared books of great value; but this feminization of Polish prose lent it too much softness, kind-heartedness, mildness, and indistinctness, depriving it of qualities such as imagination, boldness, and strength. At a certain point I rebelled and came to the conclusion that femininity in literature had to be exterminated.
Światek Karpiński, the poet, had found a philanthropist prepared to put a considerable sum of money into an as yet chimerical project involving the creation of a new literary journal in which younger folk could find a voice. In Karpiński’s conception, this little publication would in fact be a private organ for six young writers; each of them would be the independent editor of one section assigned to them.
This idea appealed to me very much, and when Światek asked what I intended to include on my page, I replied, “I’m going to fight for myself; I’m going to deal with my enemies!”
“Which ones?” he asked with interest.
He look at me admiringly.
“You know, that’s excellent! I mean, the fact that such a good idea should have occurred to you too. I was actually also thinking of using my page to settle accounts with a few of the ladies ... for example, the ones who left me for Minio.”
As can be seen, this illustrious publication very nearly became a venue for the settling of erotic scores by Światek and his dipsomaniac pals; fortunately the philanthropist failed to come through and nothing came of it all. And I never found out if the women in literature really were my enemy, and whether I was right to hold anything against them and the femininity of literature. For we find out if our resentments are justified only when we begin to fight for them.
Nor did I have any particular success with ordinary ladies and girls who had nothing to do with the intellect. What was worse, it was precisely young ladies of this kind that I most liked—good-looking, healthy women with whom there was no need to talk about art, who in themselves were beauty and grace. Alas! How many disappointments, how many painful misunderstandings arose from those perverse tendencies of mine ... perverse, because instead of staying close to those with whom I had a great deal in common, and who looked favorably on my intelligence and my artistic accomplishments, I chased after women to whom my reality was foreign, and who understood little or nothing of it all. True, my dual character lent itself to deception—my appearance was more that of a young member of the landed gentry than of a frequenter of cafés and an avant-garde writer; I played tennis rather well; I was knowledgeable about genealogy; I felt entirely comfortable in provincial company, and when I visited my various cousins deep in the country I often had lively conversations with them lasting into the night. And so it was only after a certain time that those innocent, charming young ladies realized that I was taking advantage of their trustfulness, that I was not what I claimed to be, and that in me there was something different, odd, perhaps even dangerous. And I too only understood after some time that nothing would come of amours based upon dissimulation.
And indeed nothing did come of any of it. These amours would end painfully when the girl discovered that, though I was enchanted by her, I wouldn’t allow her to get close to me—I was always hermetic, devoted to my own matters, and never frank or open even for a moment. And I could not be otherwise with them, for it would have been easier for them to understand, for example, the nature of a crocodile than my nature, formed by influences and factors about which they knew nothing.
At least I had enough integrity never to present myself as a candidate for marriage; quite the opposite, I would give them to understand from the beginning that I’d no desire to wed.
In the end these constantly repeated failures attracted the attention both of my friends and my enemies. Tadeusz Breza telephoned me one day.
“You have to come round, there’s something I have to show you.”
This “something” turned out to be a certain young actress who was just starting her career but who was already well known. She was beautiful, brimming with health, pleasant, and at the same time fond of reading and familiar with art. Tadeusz imagined that this time he’d found for me an ideal combination of body and soul, culture and nature. Far from it! The fact that she appeared on the stage, that she allowed herself to be stared at, that she had what was effectively a professional attitude toward her own grace and charms, meant that I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
Janusz Minkiewicz, known universally as Minio and by me as Gminio, who was famed for his conquests in the Warsaw demimonde, often took his revenge for various sarcastic remarks of mine (for I was not overly fond of him) by suggesting that I was motivated by envy.
“I’m going home now,” he would say coolly and matter-of-factly, “because Lala’s supposed to call me. At five I’m meeting Cela, and at 11 I’m up for some fun with Fila. Bye now.”
He would leave, convinced that I was turning green with envy. But I didn’t envy him. Women who could be interested in that rather feline, indolent poet could be of no interest to me, by the simple fact that they were interested in him.
In this domain I was like those gourmets who accept only the simplest dishes but insist on the highest quality. No mayonnaise, dressing, herbs, pepper, nothing prepared or complicated—wholemeal bread, but of the most delicious kind, fresh, luscious fruit straight from the tree, spring water ... very well, but are such wonderful things meant for cripples like myself? I often encountered them in the common people, those at the lowest level of culture, and at such times I was seized with delight, as if I’d finally found something worthy of admiration in humanity; but I stopped at that silent admiration, without even attempting to reach for that which was loftier than myself.
*
I rarely ever spent any time in nightclubs. Alcohol didn’t particularly entice me, dancing even less so, and those who frequented such places—both the women and the men—I found uninteresting. Also, this golden life against the backdrop of Warsaw’s poverty was too grating for me—I sometimes detected hatred in the eyes of the laborers mending the road in the early morning as we were leaving the Adria in our furs and hailing a cab. True, if one of those workers could have seen our empty pockets and, even more, our empty stomachs, he would quickly have realized that those orgies of ours were not so orgiastic after all. But appearances stared one in the face—here he was, at work in the cold, and there the bourgeoisie were leaving their party in the company of young women.
I suspect that in postwar Poland there was more appearance of wrongs and injustice than actual “social exploitation.” The distance between a count, old Lithuanian landowner, master, industrialist, or member of the intelligentsia on the one hand, and a worker on the other, looked immense. In reality even that landowner, industrialist, or count barely had two pennies to rub together and couldn’t afford the most basic necessities. Appearances were still loud and proud: the doffing of caps, the use of titles, servants—but truth to tell, no one was in clover, and everyone was wondering how to make ends meet on one’s own scale. It also sometimes happened that the greater one’s wealth, the worse off one ended up being. My paltry intellectual’s income still allowed me to travel abroad when I felt like it, whereas various landowning uncles of mine had to sit tight where they were, keeping an eye on taxes and expenditures and chasing around after loans.
Nor did those ill-famed dance clubs abound in luxury; at most of the tables the customers strove to consume as little as possible and from a financial point of view one could sense that the atmosphere was rather ascetic. If I did happen to stop by one of these places, it was usually in the company of artists, who are notoriously reluctant to spend money. I preferred to go elsewhere, if only to the Stu Club that had been opened by Tonio Sobański. It was located at the corner of Nowy Świat and the Aleje Jerozolimskie, and was regarded as a rather esthetic establishment, much like Tonio himself. In the afternoons I would go there for tripe soup or bigos, a cup of red barszcz with a pastry, and black coffee.
He was a rum fellow, that Tonio Sobański! A very characteristic figure, I think, for Warsaw of the time, and the gradual revolution that was taking place in Poland. A count and owner of the magnificent Guzów, he was a Bohemian; he didn’t like the country, broke with tradition, and soaked up all the artistic and intellectual ferment of the age. He was in effect disinherited, the black sheep of the family even, and he infuriated his assorted aunts with his blasphemies.
Exceptionally intelligent, a European, a man of great refinement and excellent manners, and a character who attracted the attention of others. He had no special talent of his own, or perhaps could not mobilize it in himself because of an excess of criticism—he agonized over this secretly, found an outlet in company, and was always witty and charming. Charming? Tonio’s charm may have been his Achilles heel, but there was no doubting that he was an uncommon individual. I once read a memoir, published abroad somewhere, by a certain Englishwoman who had spent a few weeks traveling round Poland. In her recollections her enchantment at Wawel, Kazimierz on the Vistula, and Wieliczka were so intertwined with paeans of praise for the “delightful Polish count” who accompanied her that in the end it wasn’t clear whether she had more admiration for Wit Stwosz’s altar-piece or for the witticism that Tonio uttered when they visited it.
In such conditions it isn’t hard to be mannered, and I’m afraid that he did not entirely succeed in avoiding this. He simply shone too much, was too conscious of the fact that he was delightful, elegant, a charmeur. He also had certain habits that irritated me fearfully; for example, there was a time when, if someone told a good joke over dinner, Tonio would get up from his seat and spin around twice with his napkin in his hand, as if laughter had brought him to his feet. He had a number of irksome little tricks of this kind. Another obsession of his was a constant desire to Europeanize Poland, yet not in a profound sense but rather in its most superficial aspects. Tonio, for instance, wished to stir up public opinion against overly vulgar and simplistic advertising; and so in the cinema, when there appeared an unimaginative slogan such as “Eat Wedel chocolates—they’re delicious,” Tonio would remark deliberately loudly: “Well, that’s a stupid advertisement. But at least we now know not to eat Wedel chocolates!” These and other such initiatives of his, some of which appeared in print in Wiadomości Literackie, wrongly brought him a reputation as a snob and an esthete. For this he was most aggressively castigated by the nationalist Skiwski, who, the poor fellow, truly had little in common with estheticism, for his attacks were heavy and loutish, as if he were wielding a plank.
But Tonio was not a snob, nor a mannered elegant. He was, however, a man of the elite, and his field of operations was restricted to the upper spheres. Such people are also necessary. He was one of the most enlightened members of the Polish aristocracy, and that too has its significance. Whoever had encountered those famous aunts of Tonio’s knew what a huge leap was needed in order to become the disgrace of that noble line. I personally once had to eject just such a countess, for she really overstepped the mark. At the time I was managing my mother’s apartment building, which incidentally provided no income whatsoever from the rents, and this lady was negotiating with me about letting an apartment for her son or some other relative. Not knowing me, and not having properly heard my last name, she imagined that she was dealing with an ordinary manager, of the kind who do not belong to “society”; and in this spirit she began to talk so arrogantly to me that I lost my patience and asked her to leave. Amongst the aristocracy, which was already on its last legs—for most of these people no longer had either estates or positions—such superiority complexes could still sometimes be found, though they didn’t usually go unpunished.
In my view Tonio played an extremely important role in the artistic circles of Warsaw, because he represented elegance, taste, distinction, and other similar virtues that were regarded amongst us as “superficial” or even “unmanly,” and in any case insufficiently heroic and vigorous. It never seemed to occur to the proponents of vigor such as Skiwski or Piasecki that those sickly and delicate French or Italians were in fact incomparably more resistant to the blows of history than we are, even though we scorn the trills of southern operas and instead adore military marches. Tonio sensed perfectly that the charm of our nation, its ability to fascinate and seduce, could be a weapon no less powerful than a cannon, and that the world has an entirely different attitude toward a nation which impresses with its style, its form, its allure. Spending a great deal of time abroad, he constantly had the opportunity to compare the beauty of Poland—let us call it that, of course in the broader sense of the word—with the beauty of other European and even American nations.
And he would return from these confrontations dispirited. I sometimes happened to hear those moans and complaints, before his impressions, brought back from England, Italy, or the United States, melted away in the drabness of Poland. He was all the more embittered because he saw in us first-rate material, and he believed that the Poles, filled with temperament and imagination and sensitivity to art, could have conquered the world if only they’d not been most dreadfully “stiffened” by a terrible combination of sclerosis, provinciality, prudery, pathos, and a strained, military “manliness.”
“How awful they are!” he exclaimed suddenly when we were walking down Nowy Świat one day.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The faces,” he replied.
*
In those dance clubs of Warsaw I met Zbyszek Uniłowski. It came about after I’d already published my first book and was working on my next one, Ferdydurke. At the time Uniłowski was a lot better known than I was, since Wiadomości Literackie had trumpeted him as a candidate for the role of greatest up-and-coming Polish writer, and his novel A Shared Room had acquired no ordinary admirer—Piłsudski himself.
One evening I went to the Adria with some people who had nothing in common with literature. We were drinking, chatting, and observing the dancers, when a young and already very rotund young man came up to me and said:
“Mr. Gombrowicz, why are you sitting with these people? Come and join my table!”
I didn’t know what to think and looked at my companions to see if they were offended; but they all knew Uniłowski. There was laughter, and I spent the rest of the evening one on one with Uniłowski in literary conversation.
Oh, those conversations with Uniłowski! For there was not just the one. This Uniłowski was already a someone, “the editor” as the waiters called him, a well-known writer, husband of one of the Lilpop daughters, who were popular in Warsaw—she had brought him a beautiful apartment on the Aleja Róż—and he was a wealthy man. He knew that he had money, and he spent it on drink in various establishments, handing out generous tips. These “establishments” may have been an obsession of his, a complex from the time that he himself had waited tables with a napkin over his arm. And so his friendship with me expressed itself above all in his dragging me out to various late-night establishments.
I too immediately took a real liking to him, and I also held him in high esteem as a writer. But despite this we were a thoroughly ill-matched pair, chalk and cheese, and we had little to say to one another. Uniłowski was a member of the proletariat who had achieved social advancement through his talent and intelligence. Like Worcell, he had been a waiter, or even a kitchen boy in some big restaurant, when Karol Szymanowski had discovered him. Szymanowski took him under his wing and helped him to publish his first book, which, if I’m not mistaken, was in fact A Shared Room. From that moment this still young lad entered into entirely different circles, where it was far from easy for someone who had to learn from scratch the necessary ways of conversing, the forms and the subtleties. I admired him; I admired how he managed to deal with so many traps and difficulties; but despite all this, he and I couldn’t find a common language. And this was more due to our different natures than to culture or upbringing.
I was a man of the cafés; I loved to spout nonsense for hours on end over black coffee and to indulge in various kinds of psychological games. He needed alcohol, dimmed lights, jazz, obliging waiters—at such times he felt that he had succeeded, that he had made it, that he had climbed to the highest floor. Maybe it wasn’t so simple; maybe there were many complex reasons that drew Uniłowski to bars and dance clubs; but I think that at least one reason was so he could be a client and a guest in the places where he used to serve.
Was it Uniłowski who told me that the mental exertions of a waiter, who has to remember orders from five tables and not make a mistake, at the same time hurrying about with bowls, bottles, juices, sauces, and salads, are infinitely greater than the exertions of an author trying to arrange the different subtle threads of his plots? “A restaurant, a large restaurant, is less exhausting physically than mentally,” he used to say. “You can’t get to sleep afterward; for hours into the night, all those ’one tripe soup’ and ’roast with mushrooms’ keep coming back to you.”
He put me in mind of Jack London. There was something kindred in their view of the world, their style, and their intelligence. Uniłowski made up for the gaps in his education and his reading with his realism, directness, temperament, and humor; there was something American about him, and I often used to think that Chicago would have been a more appropriate place for him than Warsaw. But despite my admiration, I couldn’t help the fact that our temperaments did not rhyme—we were a rather curious pair of friends, because we liked each other through our books, and we strained to bring our personal relationship up to the level of this higher literary affection. And yet with Adolf Rudnicki, who had similar shortcomings to Uniłowski, I found it infinitely easier to converse and even debate, since Adolf was expansive, lyrical, exceedingly communicative with everyone. Zbyszek Uniłowski was difficult, reserved, highly sensitive, and in a constant state of tension. In addition he was a rebel—like some precursor of Hłasko, perhaps not so much in what he wrote as what he was going to write.
I trusted his intelligence and taste to such an extent that, even though so much divided us, I gave him Ferdydurke to read when it was still in typescript. He telephoned me a few days later. “I was mad when I read it,” he said. “This is exactly what I wanted to write next. You stole my book.”
I believe he was being sincere. He’d already mentioned that he was thinking about writing a satirical work “à la Voltaire,” which would be his protest against the world and his settling of accounts with it. He was bubbling with resentment and anger; he wished for vengeance and conflict. Ferdydurke was a combative book, and it was probably thanks to this that in Zbyszek I immediately won a far from average reader.
But he continued not to understand me as a person. Because I was not a Bohemian like him, he saw me as an incorrigible, small-minded bourgeois—a bourgeois who by a strange quirk of fate happened to be a poet to whom strange things happened, as they did to Dickens’s Pickwick. “Pickwick, Pickwick,” he would call out when he saw me, pleased that he had defined me; and yet I wasn’t like that. Many things remained unsaid between us; in fact, we never once really had a frank talk. And, what was worse, I didn’t fit the style of his jokes, nor he that of mine.
I’m very much afraid that I was the indirect cause of his death.
I had a slight influenza; I was staying home and getting bored. I telephoned him to invite him to supper. He came and caught the influenza, which turned into meningitis. He died.
Perhaps it wasn’t from me that he was infected; perhaps the meningitis was caused by something else. But I cannot shake off the suspicion that if he hadn’t visited me then, he would still be alive.
The funeral was rich in—let it be said—amusing moments. A huge crowd had gathered in the church at the Powązki Cemetery, since the death of such an exceptionally promising writer had stirred public opinion. Wiadomości Literackie had even published a special issue in his honor. But these friends of Zbyszek were for the most part atheists like him—from the ministers and the generals to the most outrageous Bohemians. There were even some who had completely forgotten what the inside of a church looked like, and how to behave during the service.
And so, when the rather embarrassed priest set about celebrating the mass, half the church didn’t know when to kneel and when to stand, and in the end it was a small group of the initiated who, with deliberately ostentatious movements, showed the unbelievers what to do.
It was a great pity that he died.
Yes, he had talent—and he was a bold, sharp-witted, gifted, even wise man, though he may still have been far from overcoming his own huge problems. I held him in high regard, though I could never agree with those who considered him a great writer, along the lines of a “Polish Balzac.” Oh, those Polish Balzacs, Dickenses, and Prousts! We don’t need Polish Balzacs, but the kind of writer who would be quite unlike anyone else, whose writing would be unique, individual, and irreplaceable, of whom it would be said in France: “Oh, that writer of ours, he’s a French Uniłowski!” But realism of Uniłowski’s kind is too little for today. His literature was neither creative enough nor modern enough to become truly significant.
*
Yet from my perspective today I can see that the whole twenty-year period from 1919 to 1939 was nevertheless a huge leap forward. And perhaps most of all in lifestyle. It was a leap from the little master, dressed in bowler hat, spats, and patent leather shoes and carrying a cane, to the unbuttoned young folk who would enter the Second World War.
The most striking transformation was in conceptions of honor. The catastrophic demise of the old, formal notion of honor, with duels, seconds, and protocols, manifested itself clearly in my immediate family. My father was a gentleman in the old style, from before the first war, and he attached great significance to every kind of correctness; but even he began to show a certain sense of humor regarding the “affairs of honor” that were popular at the time. Once in Małoszyce my mother caught him engaging in a bizarre sport: He was firing a pistol at a figure chalked in profile on a board, and he was obviously aiming at its backside. My mother, who was mightily intrigued, eventually drew out of him that he had been called out to fight a duel and had decided to put a bullet in his opponent’s rear end, which happened to be rather sizable.
My older brother Janusz was, I think, more interested in his honor as a merchant than as a member of the gentry; finances played a much greater role in his worldview than the traditions and obligations of caste. He was most amused when Stefan Kozłowski, the husband of one of our cousins, happened to have a rather curious affair of honor: One day, in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol he noticed that a man sitting nearby was evidently making faces at him. He immediately went up to the fellow and demanded an apology, upon which the other man said that he wouldn’t dream of it, that he resented the implication, and so on and so forth. Before it came out that the faces the man had been pulling were not at all directed at Kozłowski but at someone sitting behind him, both men had succeeded in suitably offending one another, and the whole thing ended with a duel, which, however, was luckily bloodless.
On the other hand Jerzy, my other brother, also older than I, during his student days had shown a great fondness for this whole ritual and all the various protocols “in the affair of honor of X, Esq., with Y, Esq.”; I suspect, however, that he too was not serious about it. It was a splendid entertainment, abounding in grandiloquent formulas, and the way the two wretched “parties” each “got the wind up” gave it the appearance of genuine danger. These games were indulged in by a large number of students, who had the appropriate specialized knowledge and were thoroughly familiar with Boziewicz’s code of honor, thanks to which no dispute could take place without their involvement as seconds, arbiters, or experts. Jerzy relished his participation in these sports, writing impressive protocols in round hand, but he never, as the expression goes, played an active part. I believe that to a certain extent this took the place of today’s cinema in providing thrills... and soon, as he grew older, this mania of his passed.
And finally me, the youngest. I was utterly “dishonorable” in the sense of Boziewicz’s code; in such matters I was a savage, a barbarian, and a simpleton incapable of comprehending the hierarchy of parts of the body and unable to grasp why, for instance, a blow to the face is something more outrageous than a blow to the ear. My morality not only had nothing in common with Boziewicz, it was actually the reverse: For me, the morality of a class, group, or sphere was in fact immorality, and I demanded one law for all. But it wasn’t at once that I freed myself from the code of honor. When I was at school, our unwritten schoolboys’ code proclaimed that a person slapped was dishonored if he didn’t return the slap. This was a much simpler procedure than the complex protocols and formal exchange of bows and shots during a duel, but it also brought complications, because the one whose face was slapped in return was in no way inclined to accept it but at any cost would try to strike back once again. The net result was an endless series of slaps—smack, smack, smack—one after another, often at machine-gun speed, since in their dogged efforts to strike the other’s face both opponents left their own unprotected.
Sometimes this honorable pummeling dragged on for months, since the one who had been slapped would not retaliate immediately but instead would wait for an opportunity and only the next day, or a few days later, coming upon his opponent immobilized while eating a roll or putting on his overcoat, would deal him a blow in the so-called “puss.”
We also had a special court of honor attached to the student council, but I don’t think anyone ever appealed to it. Except for me, once. It happened like this: The president of the council was Grabiński, a serious and responsible young fellow, whose seriousness irritated me and my unruly pals. One day we burst into a sitting of the council and set about causing such a commotion that the furious president in most unambiguous language threw me out. That was all I needed. Of course I took this as an insult and brought the case before the court of honor. The matter dragged on for a fearfully long time and gave us the opportunity to cook up some magnificent documents, till in the end the vacation came, and during the vacation the whole thing evaporated.
It wasn’t only amongst schoolchildren that these affairs of honor took on ever more grotesque contours. It was one of those forms that were degenerating before my eyes, though there were others too.
I’m not sure, but I believe that a critical turning point in matters of honor was the war with the Bolsheviks in 1920.1 have the impression that this upheaval finally put an end to the age of visiting cards and frock coats; we needed a war, our own war, and a great peril, for the shots of cannon and rifles to silence the popping of pistols. True, there was no shortage of duels in subsequent years—but it was partly out of inertia, and partly a sport for amateurs. Society had become so variegated, so many groups had appeared with different moralities and manners, that someone accused of being dishonorable in one circle could move to another in which it was of no interest to anyone. And in the last instance one could give public expression to one’s scorn for “mistaken notions at odds with the spirit of the times” (the press were always glad to print such declarations), and then one passed for a pioneer and a martyr to the cause of true democracy.
Słonimski’s jokes at the expense of “honor,” for example (in his dedications he would sign himself “child in matters of honor, poet in matters of money, and scribbler—always”), were received with amusement, especially by young people.
Yet sometimes I wondered if this discontinuation of personal responsibility with weapon in hand was in fact not at all democratic—quite the opposite, it constituted yet another privilege of the upper classes. In previous times a man of the gentry lived an advantaged life, but once in a while he was obliged to risk his neck—if not in war, then in a duel. When universal military service made everyone equal as far as wartime was concerned, there still remained the duel as a special risk peculiar to the upper classes and compensating if only in part for all the comforts and privileges that money provides. Yet when this too disappeared, and the portly bourgeois no longer had even this obligation—to exchange shots when he was struck in the face—what did this mean if not total undisturbed sybaritism?
And, interestingly, the softness of our youth was noticed by visitors to Poland; two or three times I heard comments to this effect, and once a certain young German of Polish descent who had transferred from Berlin University to Warsaw University spoke to me almost indignantly of the “mildness” of Polish students, and even their “docility.” This surprised me mightily, for it was at a time of nationalist excesses and anti-Semitic violence. But later still I was even more taken aback when I saw how this “mildness” conducted itself so heroically at the front and in the resistance movement.
*
How little I knew Poland! I’m one of those people who like to stay in one place; traveling doesn’t excite me. If I left Warsaw it was to go to the country, to Małoszyce near Sandomierz or to stay with one of my brothers, one by Iłżec, the other in the Radom region; or to the mountains or the seaside; or, less frequently, to go abroad. Being neither a hunter nor a cardplayer, I didn’t hang around manor houses, nor did business interests oblige me to take trips to the provinces.
Kraków, I’m embarrassed to admit, I visited for the first time when I was nearing thirty, with the almost complete typescript of Ferdydurke in my suitcase.
I was on my way to Czorsztyn at the time, and I decided to stop in Kraków to stand face to face with Wawel and with the Polish past in general. It was a vague need that may in part have been motivated by the disquiet that was spreading throughout Europe in connection with the rearming of Germany: I wanted to take a look at that heart of the Polish nation and to check my own reactions. But, I repeat, it was neither a clear nor an urgent matter, and if Kraków had not been en route to Czorsztyn I wouldn’t have undertaken this pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage? My feelings were not especially those of a pilgrim; rather the opposite. Not long ago, reading the young Żeromski’s account of his trip to Kraków recorded in his journal, I couldn’t help juxtaposing his pilgrimage with mine, separated as they were by upward of four decades. Żeromski really was a pilgrim. “With adoration, with trembling hands you touch the marbles and whisper in the depths of your soul: ‘O, you most great ones!’” In these words he describes his visit to Wawel, in what he calls “one of life’s magnificent moments, like the moment of first communion.” As for me, I went there not to genuflect and prostrate myself but to check on myself! Check what, you may ask? I myself wasn’t entirely clear. But in any case that excursion had a quality of calculated inspection rather than humble worship.
I arrived at night, booked into a hotel, and the next morning set off for Wawel after taking a look at the market square and vicinity. It was hard not to acknowledge the noble beauty of the city, but something held me back from admiring it—perhaps because this veneration came with such alacrity from other Poles. I preferred to act more cautiously. In the end I walked up Wawel Hill. In front of me there was a party of schoolchildren; the sun was shining; it was a lovely June day. I studied the towers and the walls, the Renaissance and Baroque of the towers and walls, and tried to figure out whether we are closer to the Renaissance or to the Baroque, after which I went inside and began the eternal passage from room to room common to every museum and castle in the world.
In the “Room of the Heads” I heard someone speaking poor French. It was a gentleman trying to explain to two Frenchmen the origins of the tapestries, but not having much success; he was stammering and rolling his eyes in desperation. At several points I provided a word he needed, and we struck up a conversation. It turned out that these were not Frenchmen but Belgians, industrialists who were visiting some nearby factory; he was in the management at this factory and had been assigned to act as guide to the guests because of his knowledge of French. He was bathed in perspiration and asked if I couldn’t help him out—he’d prepared well and had a lot to convey, and it was only a question of translating what he would say from the Polish. I agreed, not realizing what I was letting myself in for.
“Please tell them: This is the famous ‘Room of the Heads’ in which the kings of Poland received envoys from around the whole world. And this is the most magnificent tapestry in the whole collection, a great masterpiece; it is unparalleled in all the world.”
I translated, but something displeased him.
“Why did you say that it was a ’beautiful tapestry,’ and not a ’masterpiece’? What are they saying?”
“They’re asking if these tapestries aren’t Belgian?”
“Tell them that there was no Belgium at that time! And now, please say that this painting by an anonymous artist of the Flemish school is of extraordinary value and could appear in the best European museums.”
I translated again. But my countryman was even less satisfied with me. He eventually asked, “What’s the laughter about?”
“We were joking because the ceiling reminds them of a switch-board.”
“You know what, sir, thanks for your help, but to be frank I can see you’re not serious enough about... This can’t be! I’d rather just try and communicate with them on my own!”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I completed my tour alone, though, alas, in a mood of rising vexation that prevented any more exalted feelings. Yes, Wawel was a jewel, it was true; it’s just that sometimes jewelry is a mark of poverty. When your neighbors religiously show you the signet ring of their great-grandfather, you can assume that in the present day the family has gone to the dogs, since they’re so impressed by the past. That whole Polish reverence for Wawel more or less worked when we were alone—that is, when no outsiders were present; but when the external world entered the picture, everything immediately became embarrassing, even comic.
And also ... after all, there in Wawel, in Kraków, one continually came across the names of Italians who had built the place, painted it, sculpted it—this entire splendor was, as if out of spite, a testimony to the fact that at that time our fine arts had been in their infancy. What were we supposed to be proud of? The fact that it was our kings who brought these artists from abroad?
I went into the cathedral. Was I to follow Żeromski and fall on my knees exclaiming, “O, you most great ones!”? For the time which had passed since that romanticism was harsh and difficult. I could no longer permit myself any facile exaltations; my times required me to be critical, austere, and sober. Everything depended on the yardstick by which I would judge those sarcophagi: a local, Polish measure or a European or worldwide one? On our domestic scale they were indeed the highest; but on a universal scale this cathedral was one of many, and these rulers, kings, and poets, some amongst many. Then was I to forget about the world here and enclose myself in my Polishness? Or was it precisely here that my duty was to become a Pole on a world scale, one that is conscious of the presence of the world?
This dilemma appeared to me with extreme clarity at the time, and I realized that it had great significance for me.
But I was still too young and wasn’t yet capable of transferring those feelings onto paper—it may have been that my attitude to Poland was not yet properly formed. In any case, I could neither write nor speak of this with any gravity, and the repugnance I felt for the classic Polish adoration found its outlet in mostly rather unsophisticated mockery and provocations.
And so, when I described that visit of mine to Wawel in an article in Kurier Poranny, it contained nothing more substantial than jokes, for which I was soundly taken to task by the nationalist Piasecki in Prosto z mostu. Truth be told, those little witticisms of mine didn’t even deserve that much, since I hadn’t written anything so terrible.
Who knows if I did not instinctively choose not to bring these matters to some resolution and some form within myself—what good would it have done? In those years it wasn’t possible to speak openly on this subject—bah, a person scarcely dared to think openly in that Europe which seemed close to madness, in that artificial, convulsive Poland caught between communism and nationalism. Was the word nation not taboo? Everything had to find its outlet first. It was necessary to wait.
*
All in all I spent a good few winter months in Zakopane. Neither my work as a court intern, nor my later literary occupations, stood in the way, and my health required it. I usually stayed at the Wojciechów, a guesthouse run by Miss Halina Szober, sister of the professor. It was a modest but agreeably situated place on a precipitous hill that became dangerous in times of ice; it was distinguished by copious and tasty meals.
I was supposed to lie on the veranda, in a fur wrap, staring for hours on end at the inevitable Giewont and its environs. The monotony of this activity was broken up by various attractions that changed from season to season. For two seasons the big attraction were the “squelchees,” a group of thoroughly unsuspecting young ladies between fifteen and eighteen years of age, nieces of Miss Szober’s from somewhere in the provinces, whom we squelched—me and my guesthouse confidant and fellow conspirator Andrzej Koźniewski. “Hey, how about squelching Miss Jolanta a little?” I would suggest to Koźniewski, to which he would reply, “Sure, let’s squelch Miss Jolanta some,” upon which we would set about squelching Miss Jolanta, who, afraid that her aunt would hear her, restricted herself to a quiet cry that turned into a terrifying suppressed squeal. Naturally there was nothing improper about this squelching—it was just parlor teasing.
We also devised a special code that was comprehensible only to us and our victims. For example, if I asked, “Miss Jolanta, why are you so crepuscular today?”, this meant that we would soon set about tormenting Miss Jolanta in a particularly refined manner.
Another attraction were the young Handelsmans, the children of Professor Handelsman. I used to flirt with Anda Handelsman and wrote a little verse in her honor: “The Andes mountains rise up high / But Anda’s the one to make me sigh!”
The tedium of sitting in a deck chair gave us an appetite for intense experiences and sometimes led to dramatic tensions—for instance, when a group of learned professors from the Jagiellonian University arrived from Kraków. At this point our carefree meals, taken at a shared table, were transformed into a kind of ceremony whose ponderous pedantry irked me beyond words. The professors would sit at the head of the table and conduct learned conversations to which the other guests would listen reverently. It sometimes happened that one of the professors would lead the discourse and take the floor. I was never fond of professors, and those discussions on philology or history seemed as heavy as a hippopotamus and not much more intelligent. So I behaved rebelliously; at the most solemn moments I would interrupt with a polite, “Would you care for a cake?” or to ask for the salt. Once, when we were regaled with a particularly heavy and unpalatable dish, flour dumplings in some kind of sauce, I protested rather loudly, saying that dumplings for the stomach and dumplings for the mind was decidedly too much. It was hardly surprising, then, that in the end there was a scene and one of the scholars almost threw a chair at me.
Such were the fun and games I had. In later years I behaved more seriously. It’s odd that despite all the time I spent there I never properly felt at home in Zakopane, perhaps because I was never a regular patron at Trzaska’s or any other restaurant.
As far as writers and artists are concerned, Witkacy was the only one I saw with any frequency—not because I sought out his company, but because I was friends with his close friend Mrs. Wądońska, an intelligent and artistically sensitive person who due to ill health was obliged to live permanently in the mountains. On her part considerable diplomacy was required to maintain some kind of harmony between natures as incompatible as Witkacy’s and mine. Though I also often had to admire the great forbearance of the master! For, knowing his difficult character, aggressive egotism, and wearisome eccentricities, I was prepared to break off relations with him at any moment; furthermore, not only did I refuse to play along with him, but in order to stand out even more than I did in other circumstances, I would become a country squire and even a snob. Those conversations of ours truly were bizarre! As Witkacy was, in his own demonic way, relishing the utter stupidity of Mr. X, I would ask: “Is he related to the Platers?” He would break off, turn his lackluster gaze on me, and reply slowly, “I don’t know if he’s related to the Platers.” At this point Mrs. Wądońska would step in hurriedly, waving the wand of peace.
If Witkacy didn’t do away with me at once, relegating me to the bottom of his list of friends, it may have been because she told him I wasn’t always so foolish. Besides, he himself must have realized that I was responding to his pose with a pose of my own.
Things were worse in larger gatherings or on walks, where he would appear in the company of his court, composed of various abject literary mongrels (since he always sought out those inferior to himself, so he could be their leader and they could worship him). In the rather narrow minds of these admirers there was no room for a pose like mine. If I’d turned into a cocaine addict and a hashish smoker, a phenomenologist and Husserlian, a blasphemer, the devil himself, they would not have been shocked in the slightest; but at the sight of a crass bumpkin like me the ground gave way beneath their feet. They regarded me as an uncommon idiot, an opinion that was entirely mutual.
Despite all this, the sight of that powerful figure striding through the snow on a starry night in the mountains, with his entourage of rapt, adoring halfwits, was most dramatic. One had the impression that some excellent thing had become distorted, thrust beneath a painful buffoonery; it was never so glaringly obvious to me that in Poland the superior and the inferior are incapable of coexistence, but only steep one another in farce. In France I saw people talking to one another like two equals, despite the fact that one of them had three university degrees and a famous name, while the other could barely read or write. Despite their differences they managed to find grounds where they could communicate freely. I’ve even seen people who were capable of speaking freely about someone else’s greatness; in such cases their ease of expression did not diminish their respect.
As I mentioned, other than Witkacy I had few contacts with the artistic circles of Zakopane, which was closely connected with the fact that I rarely visited Krupówka. But once in a while I had an artistic drinking bout. One in particular has stuck in my memory, involving Witold Małcużyński and Colette Gaveau, his present wife and at that time his fiancee. It was after a concert; even in those days Małcużyński liked to have a bit of a drink after a concert to relax. It may even have been that at that time he needed it more, because he was more afraid of the audience.
He poured vodka into himself until in the end he turned white as a sheet and staggered off to the bathroom.
“Witek,” Colette exclaimed, aghast, and a moment later ran off after him. And I went too, since I was filled with foreboding.
I was not mistaken. Without a second thought, Colette had followed Małcużyński into the gentlemen’s bathroom, which was full at that hour. It isn’t hard to imagine the consternation that ensued. The appearance of a tigress could not have caused such a stampede; everyone fled, buttoning up whatever they had to button up.
Oh, and one more drunken recollection. I went to visit an acquaintance of mine and we played chess.
“There’s some vodka in the cupboard there,” he said. “Let’s have a drink.”
And he died. Such things also happened. Sport and leisure were undermined by the demise of various stiffs.
*
Still on the subject of Zakopane.
Jazz music is blaring, “He’s marching on, / The Spanish Don, / The conquering Don Fernando!”
Dawn. The couples refuse to stop dancing even though the music has fallen silent—so the music starts up again da capo! Those are my recollections, the last probably, from Trzaska’s and the Morskie Oko restaurant. At last it’s over; the jazz musicians are putting away their instruments, people are gathering near the exit, putting on their coats and overshoes, when something comes over them once again; they start spinning around, the music is blasting, overcoats and shawls fly on the whirling clientele. The kind of party that I’ve seen break out sometimes in the early morning in the clubs of Zakopane, I’ve never come across anywhere else. Though it’s true that I’m no expert on parties.
Yet, hanging about here and there, mostly on the sidelines, in the role of onlooker whom few people knew, I couldn’t help observing a process that took place before my eyes during those years in Zakopane. I would describe it as a gradual dying out of circles and styles.
In Zakopane one encountered all kinds of people, which of course in itself would hardly be unusual, since it happens on every street of every city. But these were people at ease, unconcerned with ranks and hierarchies. Country squires from the eastern provinces or from the west, speculators, aristocrats of the Radziwiłł family, professional mountain climbers, Boy-Żeleński and Makuszyński, industry and commerce, the intelligentsia, students, consumptives, highlanders—all mingled together on Krupówki. When I first visited Zakopane around 1927, each of these groups went their own way and had their own language, their own customs, and their own table at Trzaska’s. Despite the apparent ease of manners, it was rather hard to move from one group to another; in this regard there were even devilish little tragedies that were no one’s fault. For example, what happened to Mr. Y. This Mr. Y accidentally took a room in the wrong guesthouse, and that was his downfall.
I believe it was in 1928, in the Mirabella Guesthouse, owned by one of the Szczuka daughters—I forget whether it was the canoness or her sister. In any case, all the persons who stayed there were recruited from amongst their friends and acquaintances and were, as our grandparents would have said, people “of the right tone,” from aristocratic circles. But one morning there arrived in this repository of good breeding a certain gentleman with a thoroughly unfamiliar last name, a young man with magnificent new pigskin suitcases and a dazzling walking outfit. Questions were asked—who is this fellow? No one knew.
Eventually it transpired that he had gotten lost and had pulled up here mistakenly instead of at another guesthouse. But since there happened to be a vacancy, he had been given a room. Dear Lord! This wretched fellow, who after several years of working his fingers to the bone had amassed a little money and had come to Zakopane to give himself a well-earned vacation, the first of his life, had no inkling of the terrible torments to which he had exposed himself. He appeared at dinner in an immaculate pair of knickerbockers, introduced himself to everyone enthusiastically, and, since he was talkative, wished to take part in the conversation.
At this point something dreadful happened. The conversation rejected him. It’s hard to put this any other way, since it was no one’s fault; quite the opposite, everyone tried to be nice to him, and it never even occurred to anyone to put on airs. It was just that, well, this was a company that had its own topics, its own relatives and acquaintances to talk about, and lastly its own way of joking and making fun. Everyone tried to keep the conversation on neutral ground, but the conversation, like a drunkard, kept staggering into the ditch of its habits, and returning to Staś and the fact that he was marrying Kasia. But worst of all was that the newcomer couldn’t cope in this situation. The usual reaction of a person hearing about things that are of no consequence to him is to become bored or indifferent. But this man was entranced by the very fact that he didn’t understand. Such a fascination with others’ secrets, the secrets of other circles, was common in those days; Proust describes it in his volume Within a Budding Grove. From this moment our Mr. Y lived only from the hope that in the end he would break the ice and would be admitted; and naturally things ended tragically, like any desperate efforts of this kind. He began to push in. And so the others began to push him out.
I took an active part in this drama, since in my character as writer and intellectual I was something of a black sheep in this august company and, having made friends with Y, I stirred him up against all the others. And in the end, when the situation had reached an apogee of absurdity and Y had gone completely off his rocker, I explained to him that his clothes and his luggage were too new, and that because of this he was being treated unfavorably, like a parvenu. We spent a whole evening dragging his garments in the dust and scratching his cases with a penknife so they would look used.
Why am I telling this story? Because it depicts the many-languaged nature of Poland back then, and the ridiculous situations that arose between all those different separate little worlds, which at that time seemed as mighty and impregnable as medieval castles. That year of 1928 was still an age in which Boy-Żeleński would be stared at in admiration and awe as he sat eating a buttered roll in a café. What could he be thinking about? Who was that with him? Was it Krzywicka? What were they talking about? No one would have approached that table without properly preparing the ground first, just as no one would have imposed themselves unceremoniously upon a group of bankers or professors. Then, nine years later—what a change! Young ladies barely come of age would sit down uninvited at writers’ tables to ask their opinion on what to read; they were so self-confident, certain they would be welcome, and not at all embarrassed by their own ignorance. A young industrialist would not strain excessively to be refined when he conversed with a count, and, horror of horrors, hardly seemed curious about the latter. It was the end of the myth that there existed closed groups with a patent on culture, fashion, or intelligence, or new, deluxe sins of the kind Witkacy used to shock people with. Naivety was disappearing, and with it many splendid kinds of adoration and rapturous fascination. People were more engaged in living their own lives.
If I’m not mistaken (for I sometimes get the exact dates mixed up), eight years passed between my first visit to Mrs. Kasprowicz’s on Harenda and the next, which was also the last. The first visit took place in an atmosphere of reverence almost; if any attempt at simplicity was made, it was the kind that accompanies pilgrims, and the whole thing reminded me of a second-rate Wawel—I was fearfully bored on that occasion. The second visit was more like a day trip; we poured out of the automobile in high spirits, and we only remembered about Kasprowicz on the way back. Maybe it was by chance—or perhaps it was the spirit of the times?
At the time, in my soul I was on the side of the evolution breaking down all the cults and the deference that seemed to me simply unwise, as they deprived Poles of their liberty and their boldness. Today, after twenty years in America, where people do not concern themselves with the splendors of others, whether it’s a millionaire, a dignitary, an artist, or a great scholar, where a ten-year-old boy will converse as freely with an adult as the adult would converse with Einstein, I sometimes actually feel nostalgia for the old “hindrances,” the old blushes and the awkwardness that comes from admiration.
It may have been more interesting. Naturally, it’s pleasant to feel confident and at ease with everyone, not to allow oneself to be impressed or to take too much of an interest in anyone else, to devote oneself to one’s own business. And yet we’ve lost something when we cease to sense in the next person some magnificent, unattainable secret, and when there are no longer tensions between different social circles. Does anyone impress anyone else in today’s Poland? I doubt it. You’ve acquired some wisdom, then; but you may have lost some poetry.
*
Jews played such a remarkable and characteristic role in the development of Poland in those years that they cannot be passed over. I was attracted to them from my earliest youth. I liked their intellectual vigor, their spiritual unrest, their critical and rational character; and at the same time, on many occasions they provided me with wonderful entertainment, because they were rich in foibles and amusing idiosyncrasies.
It might seem that my origins in the landed gentry would have instilled anti-Semitism in me. Nothing of the sort! In my family at least, anti-Semitism was regarded as a sign of narrow-mindedness, and none of us was ill-disposed toward Jews, though we may have retained certain prejudices of a social nature. And in any case, the anti-Semitism of the gentry was not dangerous: The “destructive role” of the Jews was criticized, but every squire had his Jew, with whom he would sit on the verandah for hours in secret conversations testifying to a coexistence that had lasted for centuries.
One of my cousins, gifted with a sense of humor not infrequently found amongst the gentry, would converse with his Israelite not on the verandah but from a second-floor balcony, so that he could yell down at the merchant standing in front of the house: “What are you trying to tell me, Moishe?!” I imagine that many people would see this as a typical manifestation of the gentry’s pompousness; but I think that my cousin, in turning himself into a proud master and the merchant into a poor “Moishe,” was making a rather profound joke—for he was mocking himself as much as the Jew, and turning the very attitude of the gentry toward the Jews into something grotesque.
At school I had little contact with Jews, since it was a hyper-Catholic and conservative institution. Those few Jews who attended it were from plutocratic spheres that were attracted to the aristocracy and were marked by intense snobbery. These boys were well dressed; they had money, they played stylish sports like tennis, and they had the sophistication that comes of frequent travels abroad. And yet it was enough to draw close to them, to enter their homes and their families a little, for that whole superficial elegance to start to fall apart, revealing unpleasant and amusing things beneath. I had a few uncles who were married to Jewish women from that same plutocracy, but I rarely saw them; as I recall, at first glance those aunts of mine looked nice, even distinguished.
It was only at university that I had more contact with Jewish circles, and I immediately discovered their otherness, within which I could move much more freely, since it contained something extravagant that eluded control. From that moment my friendship with Jews began to blossom, and in the end in the Ziemiańska Café I became known as “the King of the Jews,” since it was enough for me to sit down at a table to be surrounded by hordes of Semites; at the time they were my most gracious listeners. But was it only unconstraint and intellectual courage that attracted me to the Jews, or did that fondness of mine not have a more specific basis? It was only a long time later, after I had written several books, that I realized—as I did only in the last years before the war—that I happened to have one thing in common with them: my attitude to form.
The Jews are a tragic nation that over the course of centuries of banishment and oppression has been subject to many distortions. It’s no surprise, then, that the form of a Jew, his manner and his way of speaking, sometimes has a flavor of the grotesque. The ghetto Jews with their beards and gaberdines, the ecstatic poets from the artists’ cafés, the millionaires at the stock exchange: Almost all of them were in one way or another grotesque, almost implausible as a phenomenon. And as Jews are intelligent, they sense it—they sense it but are unable to free themselves from this bad form. And it’s because of this that they often feel themselves to be a caricature, an eccentric joke of the Creator. This tension in the Jew’s relation to form; the fact that it torments him so, or renders him laughable, or humiliates him; the fact that a Jew is never fully himself in the way that a peasant or a squire is himself, thoroughly comfortable in a form he has inherited from preceding generations; the fact that a Jew always has to be some compromise of form and its catastrophe; all this made the Jews fascinating to me. For that was what I was striving for in my art—to bring out people’s struggles with form, so they should comprehend its tyranny and fight against its violence.
These were matters that were virtually impossible to understand for those of my circles, who moved, spoke, thought, and felt in ways that had been established once and for all and had been inherited from their forefathers. It was only when war and revolution shattered this ritual and began to knead people like wax dolls, and when everything which had seemed eternal turned out to be frail and transitory, that these ideas of mine gained strength. But by then I had already observed, precisely in relation to the Jews, how frequently the proud, seigneurial ways of the people of my sphere broke down in a truly pathetic manner. The Jews seemed an embarrassment with respect to whom it was not possible to behave properly.
How often was I witness to such lamentable, painful embarrassments! The gentry and the aristocracy intermarried with the Jews in order to feather their nests, but they never ceased to be ashamed of these connections, and the unfortunate creatures born of these alliances were never fully accepted in the salons. People quite simply pretended that they knew nothing; good manners dictated that in the company of such a creature one should avoid any mention of the Jews. One never spoke of them, just as one never speaks of the gallows in the house of a hanged man. Krysia Skarbek, a lovely young lady whose heroic role in the war is well known, and who died tragically a few years ago in London, belonged to this very category of the results of mixed marriages. Her father was a count and her mother a Goldfeder. In her presence Jewish topics were shunned, and she her-self, the poor thing, never brought it up, and for the longest time everything was fine; till one day there came disaster. It happened in front of the Hotel Bristol, I believe, in Zakopane.
She was staying in the hotel, and at the time she was sitting on a deck chair on the verandah in the company of various titled individuals, when suddenly an older Jewish woman, broad in the beam and rather garishly dressed, stopped in front of the hotel. Not seeing Krysia in her seat on the verandah, she began calling out at the top of her voice, “Krysia, Krysia!” The company was immobilized with fear, most of all the unfortunate Miss Skarbek; instead of answering, she pretended that she didn’t hear, that she was not the one being called.
But all to no avail, since the cry resumed, and this time there could be no doubt: “Krysia Skarbek! Krysia Skarbek!”
You should have seen this group of people, who after all were experienced in the ways of the world: eyes staring fixedly at the ground, faces drawn. All looked as if they had been suddenly struck down with paralysis. What a blessing it would have been if someone had said simply, “Krysia, don’t you hear? One of your aunts is calling you!”
But no one was capable of uttering such simple words. As if turned to stone, they continued valiantly to pretend that they knew nothing about anything, despite the cries sounding ever more loudly. In this there was neither contempt nor hatred—it was merely a fearful helplessness, an inability to overcome convention, to summon up a more modern style.
In such abrupt confrontations there appeared to me the entire ungainliness of these Polish forms passed down unaired from long ago, and their utter inapplicability to life.
I slowly began to perceive that this Jewish world grafted onto the Polish world had an extremely subversive effect—and that this represented one of our best opportunities to devise a new species of Pole with a modern form capable of facing up to the present day. The Jews were what connected us to the most profound and most difficult problems of the world.
When I entered the law department of Warsaw University in the year of Our Lord 1923, the nationalist and anti-Semitic movement amongst young people was far from the sorry extremes it reached just before the war. During the whole of my time at the university I never witnessed any anti-Semitic incidents—though, in truth, I rarely went to the university, preferring to study the assigned readings at home.
From the beginning I became close with a number of my fellow students of Semitic origin, with whom I studied for the exams. This was my first intellectual contact with Jews. I was struck above all by the extent to which these colleagues differed from the Arians when it came to knowledge about the world and about people. My conversations with Arians were placid, and usually I learned nothing from them that I didn’t already know myself—to a great extent we had access to the same sources of information in the form of newspapers, books, family discussions, and so on. While from the Jews I learned, for example, about the possibility of a crisis in the United States, the prospects of Trotskyism, the poetry of Przyboś—things that were often utterly exotic, as if these Jews had their own separate press. I would pull a skeptical face and pretend that it was of little interest to me, but in reality I would prick up my ears, sensing that these were far from banal matters.
My Jewish friends took an instant liking to me. I think the secret of my success arose from the fact that I made no concessions to them; quite the opposite even, with my natural contrariness I emphasized all my qualities as an Arian and a member of the landed gentry. You’re familiar by now with my strategy. Well then, in my view Jews have a weakness for a fellow from the Polish gentry; he amuses them and makes them laugh, since in his company they feel more like Jews, that is, like themselves, and that allows them to live more colorfully and intensely. And if, as in my case, my game didn’t conceal any antipathy or pride, but on the contrary, rather expressed approval, a splendid game began between me and them that revolved around a mutual delectation of the other’s distinctness—and since they have a well-developed sense of humor, it wasn’t hard for me to see the glint of laughter in their eyes when I would join them. We played at squire and Jew, and through the game we overcame this burning problem better than could have been achieved with pedantic declarations of equality and other such “progressive” arguments of the intelligentsia.
But I only really got to know them when I entered the literary world and took up my nightly post in the artists’ cafés of the capital.
At that time it was already apparent that there existed between us a spiritual bond far from superficial in nature. Who supported me, who fought for me on the literary battleground if not them? Who first dared to cast his entire enthusiasm on the scales of the gathering debate over Ferdydurke if not my great, sorely missed friend Bruno Schulz? Who cleared a path for me in Poland both before and after the war, if not Artur Sandauer? And in emigration, who supported me more than Józef Wittlin? Always and everywhere, the Jews were the first to sense and to understand my work as a writer. It was so clearly pronounced that I sometimes wondered if a drop of their blood did not flow in my veins; but I’m blond and have a Slavic nose, and I could find no Israelite ancestor on the distaff side of my family tree however far back I searched. Nevertheless—perhaps because on my mother’s side I came from a family that abounded in various psychological aberrations—I had in me something of their decadence and their intellect.
Yet my intellectual, even spiritual relations with Jews never once crossed over into personal friendship. Schulz was someone extraordinarily close to me—we spent hours on end discussing matters of art that we felt passionate about—but I felt a hundred times more at home with any old relation of mine from the country. Schulz’s private existence was of no interest to me; for me he was a consciousness and a susceptibility in abstracto.
Once Lechoń, during one of his visits to Poland—for at that time he was an attaché in the Polish embassy in Paris and lived permanently in France—happened to sit at the adjoining table in the café, and he had the opportunity to overhear one of my dialogues with the Jews who at that time constituted the bulk of my audience.
The next day I met with him, since he wanted to speak with me about Ferdydurke. “Yesterday I heard you attacking Jewish naivety,” he said.
That made me think. I hardly knew Lechoń, and this may have been my first conversation with him one on one; and so I asked him what he meant.
“You see, I’m very familiar with the Jews,” more or less went his reply. “I know them so well I could write a treatise on them. Those who don’t know the Jews think that they’re cunning, double-dealing, calculating, callous—whereas you have to eat a barrel of herring with them to know that they are naive. The point is, though, that it’s a naivety hitched to cunning, and also a romanticism (because they’re more romantic than Chopin) hitched to level-headedness; you know, they’re naively un-naive and romantically level-headed.”
This formula seemed a little too facile for my liking, and I protested, but he interrupted me:
“Listen, when I heard you teasing them yesterday I thought to myself at once: Now there’s a fellow who’ll teach them a lesson! There’s a fellow who’s found their Achilles heel!”
I was somewhat suspicious of these compliments of Lechoń’s, since I regarded him as a rather insincere character. But I was struck by the accuracy of his observation, as concerned both the general qualities of the Jews and the hidden meaning of my own polemic with them. Yes, it was not their intellectual coldness that bothered me, but precisely the naivety with which they allowed themselves to be impressed by intellect... that trusting, almost childlike admiration of scientific reason, theory, doctrine, and ultimately of culture in general. Those dangerous destroyers and revolutionaries were mostly as good-natured as children; you only needed to scratch them to discover dreamers filled with an almost mystic faith—their sharpness mingling curiously with their softness. I’ve never encountered such dovelike natures as some of those cynics. And I really did tease them as best I could for their naivety. My strategy was to switch roles—so that they should become the romantics, instead of me.
I naturally had much more success at this with novices freshly arrived from the provinces than with people more secure in the capital and in themselves. Writers such as Ważyk or Wat either did not notice me at all or showed no trust in me whatsoever. Their too-dry minds couldn’t figure out what to make of someone like me. Ważyk, for example, for several years “would not take me seriously,” even though his wife, a painter, was a member of my circle and even painted my portrait. It was only after Ferdydurke appeared that Ważyk came up to me and said, “Congratulations, you’ve broken through!” Yet this acknowledgment remained without any consequences, for Ważyk’s intellect, his surrealism, his avantgardeness to me were too redolent of theory and, frankly, Ważyk bored me.
To end, I’ll tell you about a dream I had. When did I have this dream? It may have been during the Red Army’s offensive against Warsaw, when I was sixteen years old. I dreamed that I was looking out of a second-floor window in our house at Małoszyce. The beautiful garden sloped down toward the pond, beyond which were what was known as the islands, and beyond them ... [ending missing]
*
After Piłsudski died clear signs of breakdown began to appear. This Poland, less than twenty years old, lacked established principles, institutions, and procedural norms, and all that democracy hadn’t yet entered the nation’s bloodstream. As long as the panorama of political and even intellectual life was dominated by the strong personality of the Marshal, everything held together rather well—the more so because Piłsudski was far removed from any theory. No one really knew what his principles were, but he inspired confidence as someone who was disinterested yet gifted, brilliant perhaps, perhaps even a savior.
When he died we felt rather as if the wind had torn the roof from over our heads. It was right at a time when things were growing ever more turbulent in Europe. I won’t describe the process of disintegration, to which we were not alone in being subjected, but I shall restrict myself to a few personal experiences that I think were typical of the country.
As I recall, it began from astonishment. I think it would be extremely difficult to explain to the new generation just how astonished we were at that time. The tone and the content of what Hitler and Mussolini were introducing into Europe truly seemed quite fantastical. After all, we were utterly convinced that progress meant individual freedom, respect for the law, democracy, demilitarization, pacifism. The League of Nations, and then culture, art, science ... And here we were hearing about theories that were virtually medieval, and about facts that we regarded as no longer possible in our own century: the reemergence of German militarism, the invasion of Abyssinia, the war in Spain, but above all a thousand small incidents showing that a significant number of Europeans were becoming strangely different, almost exotic.
For us in Poland it was all the stranger because we’d been kept at a distance from the dramatic tensions of Europe, and we were unaware of the pressure exerted by communism. For us Russian communism was something sluggish and rather savage, Asiatic; we were nursed on the belief that the Russian giant still stood on feet of clay. In Poland organized communist activity was almost nonexistent, and we were insufficiently conscious of the powerful threat posed by revolutionary movements in Germany or Italy. We yielded to the illusion that Europe was a sun-drenched meadow, whereas in reality it was a cauldron heated by the fire of revolution and under pressure of a thousand atmospheres.
In our literary circles there soon appeared the first swallows announcing this foreign corruption coming to us from the West. It began, of course, with anti-Semitism—though this anti-Semitism was also somehow inauthentic and fearfully trashy. My table in the Ziemiańska and later in the Zodiak was not a place where particularly fastidious criteria were applied in the selection of company; quite the opposite, I was drawn to inferior kinds of people, eccentric types, scribblers, weirdos, and dubious, unsophisticated creatures from the margins. And so when we were joined one time by Mr. Brochwicz-Kozłowski, a journalist and author of a volume of short stories, I welcomed him with friendly interest, because he was a groveling coward and a hysterical bully consumed by a desire to rise to the top and prey to a sense of his own weakness, arrogant and fainthearted, a slyboots and a ham.
Brochwicz sucked up to me endlessly; he admired me, loved me, adored me, worshipped me, and he did everything he could to win my good graces. But he made up for his obsequiousness toward me by vilifying others of our group, especially those who didn’t know how to fight back. I allowed him to do so—up to a point—because it amused me, but in fact I kept him on a short leash.
The growing pollution of the air we breathed nowhere had a more tangible effect than on this Brochwicz. Somewhere around 1936 Brochwicz was a rather low but mostly harmless hysteric. In 1937 a disagreeable grimace appeared in the corners of his mouth, and out of nowhere he began making anti-Semitic remarks to the Jewish women who used to sit with us—Gizella Ważyk, Bela Gelbhadt, or “Gina,” a young poet later tortured to death by the Germans.
Naturally I put him sharply in his place once or twice; but to my surprise it didn’t help. Gradually we began to feel that something had shifted in the balance of powers. Brochwicz was no longer alone, devoid of friends, and obliged to fawn and seek our approval, and his accomplice was not Polish anti-Semitism, local and rather good-natured. It seemed as if he had found his element, but we didn’t properly know why; we hadn’t yet experienced that terrible quality of revolutions by which they bring to the surface all manner of human trash, the very dregs of society.
In 1938 Brochwicz became enigmatic and took on an unpleasant tone, supposedly jokingly but with hidden menace. People began to mutter that he was a spy. For whom? The Poles? Some other power? I found it rather hard to believe that he might be working for Hitler, since it turned out that his mother was evidently, visibly Jewish. At that time, in my naivety I imagined that a Jewish mother constituted a certain obstacle on the road to Nazism—the example of Piasecki, the editor of Prosto z mostu, a raging anti-Semite whose mother was also Jewish, was not enough for me to understand in my obtuseness that in times of revolution such sordid combinations were the order of the day, and belong to the natural way of things.
In that year, thirty-eight, in April or May I was planning to take myself off to Italy to relax after the exhausting birth of Ferdydurke. Brochwicz was also going to Italy and insisted that we set out together. I hesitated, but in the end succumbed—what won’t a person do to avoid being alone on the train.
Naturally he’d exhausted me and bored me before we even crossed the Polish border. But it was only the next day that I realized the extent of my madness, as I sat with him in the dining car listening to him slurping his soup with a noise that drowned out the sound of the train and caused a sensation throughout the car.
We stopped for a few days in Vienna, where I lost sight of him, since I had many acquaintances to visit. From Vienna we traveled directly to Italy. At the border in Tarvisio, to my amazement we were not searched at all, and the stationmaster came to Brochwicz with the offer of a private compartment. I was most taken aback, since I doubted that the renown of Ferdydurke had reached as far as Tarvisio, while my companion’s literary accomplishments were such that in my opinion he deserved a prison cell more than his own compartment. But we were still so naive in those days! In Rome we took up residence in a stylish hotel on the Via Vittorio Veneto. Once again I was surprised that Brochwicz could afford such a place. As far as I could I avoided sharing my meals with him, since he slurped his spaghetti much as he had his soup; so we rarely saw one another.
All at once I understood. It was in the Vatican, as I was strolling from room to room. Yes, he must be a Nazi agent! I was led to this conclusion not by any facts or logical arguments but only by nuances and tones ... yes, the tone of his conversation with that German while we were still in the train, as we were leaving Vienna. I remembered the scene. The German was an ardent Nazi; in Brochwicz, because of the nonaggression treaty he saw an ally. They fell into conversation in the corridor of the car, and I listened without understanding much. But now, as I recalled Brochwicz’s behavior, his servility, that characteristic fearful eagerness of his, I understood—yes, that was the tone of an agent, a spy!
*
I wish to say some more about that trip to Italy. It was my last encounter with Europe, not counting my glimpses of the coast of France in Boulogne and of England in the fog of the English Channel a year later.
Spring in Italy was magnificent. I warmed myself in the sun in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, a stone’s throw from my hotel; I went to the ocean at Ostia, and spent more time wandering about, eating snails and washing them down with Chianti, than fulfilling the duties of a tourist in the museums and churches. That rambling took control of me. The great exertion of Ferdydurke was behind me; I felt as if I were on vacation. I had no plans, and even no desire to entertain myself. At that very moment the jury of Wiadomości Literackie was deciding the prize for the best book of 1937, and I’d already spent those few thousand zloties in advance—rashly, as it transpired, since the prize was given to Boy-Żeleński for Marysieńka. But I cared little about this; I knew that with the prize or without it, I had entered Polish literature for good. I was taking my rest.
Yet at the same time I was horrified.
The buildings of Rome and its paintings—this I knew; it had bored me years before, in Paris. I so hated museums and all that artistic opulence, the excess of which makes one’s head ache, that I visited only the Forum. Despite everything, though, that pure, pellucid Latin climate with its ancient aroma, a separate discipline unto itself, swept over me, and I soaked it in through every pore. But in that air and against that noble landscape there was also something turbid and monstrous, a specter as if from a nightmare. The newspapers carried shrill praise of the Berlin-Rome Axis, and the stench of blackmail and betrayal—for me, the conspiracy between Italy and Germany meant the betrayal of Europe—dominated the streets, Mussolini’s speeches, the fascists’ songs, and even the soldier games played by the brats in front of the Villa Borghese.
I went to a reception given by a certain female singer, whose name I don’t recall. Regaled with wine, I listened intently to that bel canto of theirs which is so familiar to the Polish ear. Then suddenly something snapped and politics burst in; the guests grew excited and began waving their arms about and trumpeting the praises of il Duce! The aging primadonna suddenly burst into tears, her face in her hands, her pearls dangling, lamenting that her music had been spurned, that no one wanted arias any longer but only politics! That image remains with me; I can see her, crushed, slumping in an armchair.
On the Forum shady individuals approached me offering to be my guide and indicating that they had been persecuted by the police for their political views; this seemed a new method of extracting money from American tourists.
I wasn’t able to speak freely with any of my Italian acquaintances (admittedly there were not many of them). And perhaps not because they were afraid, but because they were disoriented. Truth be told, no one knew anything any more. A dreadful doubt—perhaps il Duce is after all the man of the hour and an infallible leader—ate away like a cancer at that always level-headed Latin character. It ate away at the Poles too.
I was buying cigarettes at a kiosk when an individual with ruddy hair, pale blue eyes, and a straight flat nose came up: A Pole! He bought cigarettes and asked in Polish, “Do you have any portraits of Mussolini?”
The question was accompanied by his pointing a finger at a picture of the leader. As he received the portrait he gave a devout sigh: “Oh, we could use a fellow like this in Poland; yes indeed, sir, he’s just what we need.”
The cigarette seller naturally didn’t understand a word, but he was obviously used to comments of this kind from foreigners, and he replied immediately with equal devoutness, “Si, si, il Duce great, Mussolini leader!”
To which my Pole added in rapture, “Mussolini! Mussolini!”
And the cigarette seller ecstatically, “Mussolini! Mussolini!”
These jabberings rather accurately reflected the international situation. I walked away. How difficult it was to make anything out in the mists of those times. Everyone was waiting for a verdict from History, but History was not in any hurry; it was unclear who was lying, who was bluffing, and who was genuine. Contours were blurred and boundaries washed away.
I “made contact,” as they say, with the Polish community in Rome and spent one evening with my countrymen. One only, because we didn’t take a liking to one another. I noticed immediately that those of them who had been in Rome for a long time considered themselves to be “rather better.” They were terribly Latin and Hellenic, and when they encountered a poor savage newly arrived from Poland, they turned up their noses as if they personally had painted all the ceilings at the Quirinal. In order not to disappoint them I accepted the role of barbarian and performed it so well, and uttered so many fearful anticultural heresies, that they paid the bill as quickly as they could and went off home. The next day I boarded a train that was to take me to Venice.
On the way I got to know a group of airmen who were also traveling to Venice, on leave to see their families. We talked all night and, already friends, arranged to meet the following day on St. Mark’s Square.
That “salon of Europe” was deserted; I don’t know if the season had not yet begun, or if there was a smell of gunpowder because of Austria. The pigeons, and the blue of sky and earth, were infused with melancholy and abandonment.
“Very well, but what if il Duce ordered you to bomb all this?” With a sweeping gesture I took in the church, the palace, the Procuratorium.
“Then not one stone would be left on a stone,” replied the oldest of them, who was maybe twenty-five, in his broken French. This answer didn’t surprise me. It was to be expected. But I was surprised at the joy with which he spoke—his eyes shone, and he virtually proclaimed it to me; and on his friends’ faces, when they found out what was being said, I also read an unconcealed satisfaction. What were they so pleased about? Was it not that they felt themselves to be creators of history? The past had become less important than the future, and it could be destroyed.
That week in Venice was onerous, poisoned with some savage element that seeped into the calm of the Renaissance and the Gothic.
I was in a somber mood as I returned homeward. It was growing dark, the train was racing toward Vienna, and I had the impression that it was whisking me off into darkness; it was becoming harder to make out shapes, tiny lights appeared in unknown regions, and the rocking of the train as it rushed into that space was turning apocalyptic. And then I suddenly realized that I wasn’t the only one afraid.
Around me, in the compartment and in the corridor, everyone was scared. Faces were drawn; some comments were exchanged, remarks were made. What was it? Something had obviously happened. But I was reluctant to ask anyone.
When we drew into the suburbs of Vienna I saw crowds of cheering people with torches. Cries of “Heil Hitler” reached our ears. The city was in a frenzy.
I understood: It was the Anschluss. Hitler was entering Vienna.