'Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) is part of a celebrated generation of mid-20th-century Polish writers, one that includes the doomed magic-realist short story writer Bruno Schulz, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, author of the great and sexily titled novel Insatiability. All these writers knew, admired and supported one another.
'Schulz, for instance, once gave a lecture on Gombrowicz in which he underscored that his friend's fiction "did not follow the smooth path of intellectual speculation but the path of pathology, of his own pathology." In recalling that talk, Gombrowicz added: "This was true."
'Certainly, Pornografia, first published in Polish in 1960, seems as sick, as pathologically creepy a novel as one is ever likely to read. In some ways, it resembles a rather more polymorphously perverse version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses or one of those disturbing fictions by European intellectuals that blend the philosophical with the erotic: Think of Georges Bataille's The Story of the Eye or Pierre Klossowski's Roberte Ce Soir. Gombrowicz himself once dryly described Pornografia as "a noble, a classical novel. . . . The novel of two middle-aged men and a couple of adolescents; a sensually metaphysical novel."
'Set in Poland during World War II, the book focuses on a visit by two Warsaw intellectuals to a country estate, where a pair of young people catch their eye. Henia is engaged to an upright young lawyer; Karol is a handsome 16-year-old farmhand. The narrator, who is named Witold, and his extremist friend Fryderyk soon decide that these two "children" belong together, even though they reveal absolutely no particular interest in each other. But what does that matter?
'Fryderyk soon begins to act like a theater director, manipulating the people around him, designing ambiguous encounters and sexually charged scenes. When, early on, he points out that Karol's dirty workpants are dragging in the mud, the boy starts to bend over to adjust the cuffs. "No, wait," says Fryderyk. "Let her roll them up." After a brief silence, the obedient Henia, who is the daughter of the household, stoops down and does as she has been told.
'Fryderyk, it is clear, possesses a sometimes painfully acute awareness of social dynamics, always sensing the dark impulses and desires lurking within the most upright-seeming people. Commenting on his almost parodistically Nietzschean character, Gombrowicz asserted that Fryderyk ultimately aims "to reach different 'realities,' unforeseen charms and beauties, by selecting people, by forming new combinations between the young and the old -- a sort of Christopher Columbus who isn't searching for America, but for a new reality, a new poetry."
'In the novel, however, Witold repeatedly questions Fryderyk's sanity, even though he, too, is soon caught up in an unsettling drama. The four of them, he concludes, make up "some strange erotic combination, an eerie yet sensual quartet."
'Throughout his work, and especially in his most famous book, Ferdydurke (1937), Gombrowicz espouses a cult of youth. Man, he insists, wants to be young, and in "Ferdydurke" he shows what happens to an adult who is changed into a schoolboy. That novel is, to some degree, often bizarrely comic. Not so, the distressing Pornografia, though he insists that this much later book is simply "a particularly irritating case of the Ferdydurkean world: the Younger creating the Older."
'Certainly, the novel's two vampiristic debauchees desperately need their connection with childlike Henia and Karol -- who, it turns out, aren't quite as innocent as they seem. Karol admits that he would like to sleep with Henia's mother; Henia confesses that marriage will keep her from giving in to certain of her sexual inclinations. Following such revelations, Witold proclaims that he is virtually "bathing in their eroticism." The tacitly homosexual relationship of Witold and Fryderyk further intensifies the book's perfervid kinkiness.
'Gombrowicz's French publisher once summed up the author's personality as "irritating" but added that that quality was transmuted into work that was perennially "perturbing." Certainly, most readers will find Pornografia perturbing, or worse: repulsive, confusing, ugly. As Milosz once said of Gombrowicz: "He had no reverence whatsoever for literature. He derided it as a snobbish ritual, and if he practiced it, he attempted to get rid of all its accepted rules."
'Perhaps not quite all of them. Gombrowicz did believe that "the primary task of creative literature is to rejuvenate our problems." That seems absolutely right. Whether you like his work or not, you can still understand why Milan Kundera called him "one of the great novelists of our century."Pornografia -- which follows Danuta Borchardt's earlier and now standard translations of Ferdydurke and Cosmos -- compels its reader to recognize the complexities of human psychology and the darkness at the heart of sexual desire.'-- Michael Dirda
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Gallery
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Further
Witold Gombrowicz Official Website
The Witold Gombrowicz Home Page
Witold Gombrowicz Museum
'The World of Witold Gombrowicz'
'Witold Gombrowicz, and to Hell with Culture'
Witold Gombrowicz Archive
'Gombrowicz's Unknown Journal'
'What You Didn't Know About Gombrowicz…'
Witold Gombrowicz @ goodreads
'Imp of the Perverse'
'Art of Self-Defense'
'Witold Gombrowicz or The Sadness of Form'
'BACACAY BY WITOLD GOMBROWICZ'
'The Untranslatable Literature of Witold Gombrowicz'
'consciousness & masturbation: a note on witold gombrowicz’s onanomaniacal novel cosmos'
'Reading Witold Gombrowicz'
Witold Gombrowicz @ The Paris Review
'Wrapped Up in the Mystery of Cosmos'
'The Plotlessness Thickens
'Witold Gombrowicz confronts (Polish) provincialism'
'ORIGINS OF A ‘PRE-INTERNET BLOG''
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Extras
Witold Gombrowicz - 1 - Vence, 1969
Witold Gombrowicz - 2 - Vence, 1969
Witold Gombrowicz - 3 - Vence, 1969
Gombrowicz - List z Argentyny
Witold Gombrowicz - Forma Upupiona
Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969): Une vie une oeuvre
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Manuscripts
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Interview with Danuta Borchardt
translator of Pornografia
Luke Sykora: Pornografia is the third novel by Witold Gombrowicz you've translated. What is it that attracts you to Gombrowicz's work, and why do you think it's important that contemporary English readers read him?
Danuta Borchardt: My attraction to Gombrowicz’s work evolved quite fortuitously. Since the 1980s I have been writing my own short fiction in English. At some point I attended a seminar led by Andrei Codrescu, who had already published a few of my pieces in his journal Exquisite Corpse. During that seminar, Andrei talked about his favorite Polish writers: Bruno Schulz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, and Witold Gombrowicz. I happened to have at home Gombrowicz’s novel Cosmos (in Polish), and I began reading it. It struck me how beautiful it would be when translated into English, and I decided to try my hand at it, even though I had never translated anything before. I felt that both my surrealistic bent and my somewhat idiosyncratic style were in synchrony with those of Gombrowicz. I admired his down-to-earth attitude toward life and literature. He did not mince words. He was an iconoclast.
As far as his relevance, there is a striking passage in Ferdydurke: “the face of the 20th century, the century of all centuries gone mad.” And this is even before the subsequent horrors of World War II. Or: “Tut, tut, as everyone knows, mankind needs myths—it chooses this one or that one from among its numerous authors (but who can ever explore or shed light on the course that such a choice has taken?)” Gombrowicz is talking here about authors, but it applies to any modern-day myth-making. His importance for the contemporary reader also lies in his place in 20th-century thinking and literature—he was a forerunner of the existential movement in Europe (Ferdydurke was written a year before Sartre’s Nausea). Pornografia missed, by a narrow margin, the prestigious International Editors Prize for Literature in 1966, but his novel Cosmos won it the following year. In 1968, Gombrowicz was a runner-up for the Nobel Prize.
LS: What makes Pornografia unique, compared to Gombrowicz's other novels?
DB: Pornografia focuses, perhaps more than his other three novels, on the outer limits of the imagination—on the “forbidden”—on the erotic fantasies of middle age and on living them through the young, and on manipulations that influence the young to the point of crime and murder.
Also, in Pornografia Gombrowicz tests the notion of belief in God versus non-belief. According to Jerzy Jarzębski, one of Gombrowicz’s foremost scholars: “Pornografia is blasphemous in the sense that it presents traditional culture and national customs in a state of exhaustion and atrophy.” Jarzębski, suggests that Gombrowicz’s ideas may originate from the existentialists’ “death of God,” from old age generally, from World War II and the demands it placed on Polish society, and from the collapse of moral values.
LS: You mention Gombrowicz's response to Polish traditional or national culture. What did mainstream Polish culture at the time mean for Gombrowicz, and why was he so frustrated by it?
DB: This comes up in most of his writings. When he was writing Ferdydurke, the Polish psyche was steeped, after 150 years of occupation by foreign powers, in newly regained freedom. He was reacting to the glorifying of national heroes, artists, etc., the nation forgetting perhaps that a lot of work was yet to be done at the level of improving the lives of ordinary citizens. Understandable, but perhaps exaggerated, because a lot was achieved in the twenty years of independence between the two World Wars. In his short story “The Memoirs of Stefan Czarniecki,” Gombrowicz bemoans the rising enthusiasm for nationalism and for yet another war that was approaching and that was to destroy Poland again. In Pornografia, he expresses weariness with such war mentality. Trans-Atlantyk, written in Argentina, is a satire on the Polish émigré society in Argentina. But this is only on the surface, because he addresses the larger issues of Poland’s inability to carve for herself an existence on the larger geopolitical arena. “Go, go, again and be killed” he says in effect to his compatriots returning from Argentina to Europe at the outbreak of World War II. He also makes fun of the Polish character in its adherence to outdated social mores such as duels—which, by the way, were no longer taking place in 20th-century Poland—and to name-dropping, to “do you know who I am?” posturing. As I’m saying all this, it becomes apparent, I think, that all these concerns and, most important of all, his recognition of the stupidity and futility of wars as a way of solving problems, apply to all, not only Polish, societies.
LS: Pornografia is set in World War II, but the war is mostly a distant backdrop for the central action. The only major war-related character is a Polish resistance fighter, and he is painted in a fairly unflattering light. Why do you think Gombrowicz chose to set this novel during World War II?
DB: Gombrowicz himself addresses this in the “Information” section of Pornografia (a sort of preface): “Pornografia takes place in the Poland of the war years. Why? Partly because the atmosphere of war is most appropriate for it. Partly because it is very Polish—and perhaps it was initially conceived on the model of a cheap novel in the manner of Rodziewiczówna or Zarzycka (did this similarity disappear in its subsequent adaptation?) And partly just to be contrary—to suggest to the nation that its womb can accommodate conflicts, dramas, ideas other than those already theoretically established.”
I might add that although World War II is a “distant backdrop,” there are ominous foreshadowings to some of the action. Placing the first scene, the café scene, smack in the middle of the German occupation (1943), the fear of the general situation that Hipolit expresses in his invitation to Witold to visit him in the country . . . Perhaps it is easier for those who have gone through a war to sense this “backdrop” of danger than for those who have not.
LS: You were born in Poland, and came to the West as a refugee during World War II. How closely can you relate to the world of the Polish countryside that Gombrowicz depicts in Pornografia? Does it seem familiar, or alien, or maybe somewhere in between?
DB: I relate to the Polish countryside very closely—it is totally familiar to me. As a child, I spent a couple of summers (1938 and 1939) at my grandparent’s country place near Wilno (then Polish, now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). I remember those times as some of the happiest of my childhood. For example, my father taking me by the hand and leading me to a swamp area that he wanted, some day, to convert into a pond. Of course this never happened because of the outbreak of World War II.
LS: Pornografia depicts two adult men sharing a bizarre obsession with the erotic feelings of the adolescents in their midst. But compared to many other novels, Pornografia doesn't seem very pornographic at all, in the sense of overt depictions of sexuality. Why do you think Gombrowicz titled the novel Pornografia? What, if anything, is “pornographic” about the novel?
DB: The title is somewhat of a teaser. To quote Gombrowicz again: “At that time [he is talking about 1953] it wasn’t such a bad title, today, in view of the excess of pornography, it sounds banal, and in a few languages it was changed to Seduction.” Anyway, Gombrowicz does not consider his novel as solely a voyeuristic exercise, but more as a vehicle for dealing with wider issues.
LS: Why do you think Witold Gombrowicz decided to have Pornografia narrated by a character named “Witold Gombrowicz”?
DB: All of Gombrowicz’s works are narrated this way. Some might consider it a mark of his egocentricity (for example, his Diary, a series of magnificent essays on philosophy, art, literature, politics, etc., begins: “Monday—I. Tuesday—I. Wednesday—I. Thursday—I.”) But this would be a facile interpretation. It is more germane to say that Gombrowicz wants to show us—in a very direct way and not through third-person characters—what we are as human beings, as individuals, with all our frailties, all our evil thoughts and deeds, and how to free ourselves from our shackles. He is a master at making the elegant distinction between Gombrowicz the author, the narrator, and the character.
Gombrowicz puts forward the idea of the “individual” first in Ferdydurke, in his argument that it’s the “brat” in us, the immature part, which is the springboard for our creativity. Also, in the philosophical passages where he urges us to be true to ourselves: “the most important is not: to die for ideas, styles, theses, slogans, beliefs; and also not: to solidify and enclose ourselves in them; but something different, it is this: to step back a pace and secure a distance from everything that unendingly happens to us.” The philosophical passages in Ferdydurke are particularly worthy of attention in this respect. Secondly, in Trans-Atlantyk, as well as in his other works, he shies away from the idea of being primarily a Pole, not a very popular idea with the closed-minded. One should be first and foremost an individual, a human being.
LS: Gombrowicz's writing can sometimes be purposefully amateurish and goofy. He seems uncomfortable with the traditionally “classical” understanding of beauty and art, involving balance, proportion, elegance, and the like. As you translate him, is there ever a temptation to sanitize is prose, to tone down his more exuberant and idiosyncratic tendencies?
DB: Writing in a purposefully “amateurish” and “goofy” manner is the very essence of Gombrowicz’s style. It is his way, I think, of showing the struggle between Form and Chaos, two of his most important philosophical categories. One might view his “goofiness” as a way of letting go of established norms in writing. Also, since this style makes his prose so lively and vibrant, it is so important, and often difficult, to convey it in English. However, one cannot deny that many passages in his novels are also written in absolutely beautiful poetic prose, and I keep hearing remarks to this effect about the translations. This is not, I can assure you, due to any manipulation of his language on my part. And no, I am never tempted to sanitize his prose or tone down his idiosyncrasies. As a matter of fact, when I must choose among several options I go for the most extreme, as long as it is true to the original, and as long as the English language can tolerate it. Since language is so vital in Gombrowicz’s work, translating it from other languages did not work, and hence there was the need for re-translating it directly from the Polish.
LS: There are indeed a lot of incredibly lyrical passages in Gombrowicz. I think that's one of the most challenging but also interesting and unique things about reading his work—at one moment he can be playing the buffoon, and the next moment he is a poet.
DB: I absolutely agree. And Gombrowicz was also adept at using various Polish vernaculars, when the occasion called for it: the usual language, "intelligentsia" language, peasant language, Leon's crazy language, and, of course, Gombrowicz's own language. The apogee of this occurs in Trans-Atlantyk, and there was a special reason for this. The novel is a tragicomedy. Gombrowicz wrote it at a time when he was deeply troubled by the war, his country being destroyed, his family and friends in terrible danger. Yet here he was, in Argentina, away from it all, and helpless. He decided that, in order to gain distance as a writer, he would write something in a language removed from his time. So he wrote it in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century Polish, as well as in the language of Polish peasants who had emigrated to Argentina at the break of the 19th and 20th centuries. These older varieties are not greatly removed from present-day Polish, but they would be in the English language. You can imagine what a formidable task this is for a translator!
LS: What about the languages themselves? Are there any significant challenges in translating Gombrowicz's Polish into English?
DB: The challenges are enormous. The clearest is the issue of verbs; in Polish, verbs can be omitted without loss of meaning. This makes it necessary to insert them where Gombrowicz does not. Omission of verbs in English is occasionally acceptable in colloquial language, or as a literary device, but not as a norm. Another problem is Gombrowicz’s overuse of diminutives, which hardly exist in English. Gombrowicz does this to accentuate the artificiality and pomposity that many Poles indulge in as they’re speaking. The most prominent issue is Gombrowicz’s introduction of an unusual use of idioms and his creation of neologisms. Some of these have entered into the Polish vocabulary. In all these respects,Ferdydurke was the most difficult to translate. But Trans-Atlantyk was also difficult, according to the author himself, and as I mentioned earlier.
LS: Is it difficult to translate humor from one language to another?
DB: Yes, because it is so strongly ingrained in local cultural and social mores. However, if one is attuned to it in the original, the equivalents can be found in the target language. I feel strongly that a translator must be endowed with an innate sense of humor to pull this off.
LS: This brings up the issue of context—Gombrowicz's sense of humor, his satire, sometimes targets elements of mid-century Polish culture that most modern American readers are probably not familiar with. Many readers are probably more familiar with Shakespeare's England—or maybe even Dante's Florence—than with Gombrowicz's Poland, which I imagine is an added challenge when it comes to translating him.
DB: I think I touched on this earlier, for example: the everyday lingo with diminutives, the puffing up, the name-dropping, the chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, the “I must defend my honor” kind of posturing, all of which are satirized in Trans-Atlantyk, and also the nationalist ideology and concomitant hero-worship (among ourselves and among foreigners: “Chopin was Polish, we have Marie Curie-Skłodowska,” etc., etc.). Actually, I don’t think these present challenges in translating Gombrowicz, it’s the particular language that he uses to convey them that poses difficulties in making them sound humorous. For example, he uses a lot of idioms that, Poland being (and having been at his time even more so) primarily an agricultural society, originate from nature (land, animals). These don’t quite work in English.
LS: Gombrowicz had been living in Argentina for almost thirty years by the time he wrote Pornografia.Why didn't he write it in Spanish?
DB: Gombrowicz was not Joseph Conrad, who became immersed in a foreign language when he was about seventeen. Although Gombrowicz has learned Spanish to some degree, he had already become a seasoned writer in Polish (short stories, Ferdydurke, a couple of plays, Diary, Trans-Atlantyk) by the time he was writing Pornografia, his penultimate novel.
I can say from personal experience that it is very difficult to be a writer in a foreign language. I began learning English when I was about thirteen, and it took me a long time and practice, practice, practice, to attain a somewhat literary level. Although I have Polish “in my gut,” it would take an extraordinary amount of work for me to write in literary Polish. For one thing, I don’t live in Polish society, I’m not surrounded by the language. Although I keep up with the changes that are occurring in the language through reading and occasional visits to Poland, these are not the mainsprings that a writer needs. You might say that Czesław Miłosz wrote poetry in Polish while living in the U.S. but, again, he was a mature writer when he arrived here. There is also, for me, something special in the English language: I like what I consider its simplicity, its logic, its unconvoluted grammar. God forbid trying to write in German with its grammar and undending words! Yet I know Polish well enough to understand its (and Gombrowicz’s) nuances. My parents (and I in my childhood) grew up on it.
LS: Has spending so much time with Gombrowicz's prose influenced your own experience of reading and writing fiction?
DB: The reverse happened. It was my experience of writing fiction, as well as reading (Cheever, Barth, Barthelme, Beckett’s novels), that led me to spend so much time with Gombrowicz. Also, it was not only his prose but the process of translating it that has led me to know English better has and influenced my writing. Writing and translating are cross-pollinating processes. Had I been a writer in Polish, Gombrowicz might have influenced my writing, but I’m not sure. What is quite certain is that he had an influence on such South American writers as Cortazár and Bolaño.
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Book
Grove Atlantic
'An outlandish stylist, a provocative philosopher on youth and sexuality, and one of the indisputable totems of twentieth-century world literature, Witold Gombrowicz wrote Pornografia after leaving his native Poland for Argentina in 1939 and then watching from afar as the German invasion destroyed his country. Translated for the first time into English from the original Polish by award-winning translator Danuta Borchardt, Pornografia is one of Gombrowicz’s highest regarded works—a richly imagined tale of violence and carnality set in wartime Poland.
'In the midst of the German occupation, two aging intellectuals travel to a farm in the countryside, looking for a respite from the hellish scene in Warsaw. They quickly grow bored of their bucolic surroundings—that is, until they are hypnotized by a pair of country youths who have grown up alongside each other: the betrothed daughter of the farm’s owner, and a young farmhand who has just returned from a stint in the Polish resistance. The older men are determined to orchestrate a tryst between the two teenagers, but they are soon distracted by a string of violent developments: the cold-blooded murder of the young girl’s future mother-in-law and, even more disturbing, an order that comes down from the leadership of the underground movement for the men at the farm to assassinate a rogue resistance captain who has sought refuge there. The erotic games are put on hold—until the two dissolute intellectuals find a way to involve their pawns in the murderous plot.'-- Grove Atlantic
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Excerpt
I’ll tell you about yet another adventure of mine, probably one of the most disastrous. At the time—the year was 1943—I was living in what was once Poland and what was once Warsaw, at the rock-bottom of an accomplished fact. Silence. The thinned-out bunch of companions and friends from the former cafés—the Zodiac, the Ziemiańska, the Ipsu—would gather in an apartment on Krucza Street and there, drinking, we tried hard to go on as artists, writers, and thinkers … picking up our old, earlier conversations and disputes about art. … Hey, hey, hey, to this day I see us sitting or lying around in thick cigarette smoke, this one somewhat skeleton-like, that one scarred, and all shouting, screaming. So this one was shouting: God, another: art, a third: the nation, a fourth: the proletariat, and so we debated furiously, and it went on and on—God, art, nation, proletariat—but one day a middle-aged guy turned up, dark and lean, with an aquiline nose and, observing all due formality, he introduced himself to everyone individually. After which he hardly spoke.
He scrupulously thanked us for the glass of vodka we offered him—and no less scrupulously he said: “I would also like to ask you for a match …” Whereupon he waited for the match, and he waited … and, when given it, he proceeded to light his cigarette. In the meantime the discussion raged—God, proletariat, nation, art—while the stench was peeking into our nostrils. Someone asked: “Fryderyk, sir, what winds have blown you here?”—to which he instantly gave an exhaustive reply: “I learned from Madame Ewa that Piętak frequently comes here, therefore I dropped in, since I have four rabbit pelts and the sole of a shoe.” And, to show that these were not empty words, he displayed the pelts, which had been wrapped in paper.
He was served tea, which he drank, but a piece of sugar remained on his little plate—so he reached for it to bring it to his mouth—but perhaps deeming this action not sufficiently justified, he withdrew his hand—yet withdrawing his hand was something even less justified—so he reached for the sugar again and ate it—but he probably ate it not so much for pleasure as merely for the sake of behaving properly … towards the sugar or towards us? … and wishing to erase this impression he coughed and, to justify the cough, he pulled out his handkerchief, but by now he didn’t dare wipe his nose—so he just moved his leg. Moving his leg presented him, it seemed, with new complications, so he fell silent and sat stock-still. This singular behavior (because he did nothing but “behave”, he incessantly “behaved”) aroused my curiosity even then, on first meeting him, and in the ensuing months I became close to this man, who actually turned out to be someone not lacking refinement, he was someone with experience in the realm of art as well (at one time he was involved in the theater). I don’t know … I don’t know … suffice it to say that we both became involved in a little business that provided us with a livelihood. Well, yes, but this did not last long, because one day I received a letter, a letter from a person known as Hipolit, Hipolit S., a landowner from the Sandomierz region, suggesting that we visit him—Hipolit also mentioned that he would like to discuss some of his Warsaw affairs in which we could be helpful to him. “Supposedly it’s peaceful here, nothing of note, but there are marauding bands, sometimes they attack, there’s a loosening of conduct, you know. Come, both of you, we’ll feel safer.”
Travel there? The two of us? I was beset by misgivings, difficult to express, about the two of us traveling … because to take him there with me, to the countryside, so that he could continue his game, well … And his body, that body so … “peculiar”? … To travel with him and ignore his untiring “silently-shouting impropriety”? … To burden myself with someone so “compromised and, as a result, so compromising”? … To expose myself to the ridicule of this stubbornly conducted “dialogue” … with … with whom actually? … And his “knowledge,” this knowledge of his about … ? And his cunning? And his ruses? Indeed, I didn’t relish the idea, but on the other hand he was so isolated from us in that eternal game of his … so separate from our collective drama, so disconnected from the discussion “nation, God, proletariat, art” … that I found it restful, it gave me some relief. … At the same time he was so irreproachable, and calm, and circumspect! Let’s go then, so much more pleasant for the two of us to go together! The outcome was that—we forced ourselves into a train compartment and bore our way into its crowded interior … until the train finally moved, grinding.
Three o’clock in the afternoon. Foggy. A hag’s torso splitting Fryderyk in half, a child’s leg riding onto his chin … and so he traveled … but he traveled, as always, correctly and with perfect manners. He was silent. I too was silent, the journey jerked us and threw us about, yet everything was as if set solid … but through a bit of the window I saw bluish-gray, sleeping fields that we rode into with a swaying rumble. … It was the same flat expanse I’ve seen so many times before, embraced by the horizon, the checkered land, a few trees flying by, a little house, outbuildings receding behind it … the same things as ever, things anticipated … Yet not the same! And not the same, just because the same! And unknown, and unintelligible, indeed, unfathomable, ungraspable! The child screamed, the hag sneezed …
The sour smell … The long-familiar, eternal wretchedness of a train ride, a stretch of sagging power lines, of a ditch, the sudden incursion of a tree into the window, a utility pole, a shed, the swift backward dash of everything, slipping away … while there, far, on the horizon a chimney or a hill … appeared and persisted for a long time, stubbornly, like a prevailing anxiety, a dominant anxiety … until, with a slow turning, it all fell into nothing. I had Fryderyk right in front of me, two other heads separating us, his head was close, close by, and I could see it—he was silent and riding on—while the presence of alien, brazen bodies, crawling and pressing on us, only deepened my tête-à-tête with him … without a word … so much so that, by the living God, I would have preferred not to be traveling with him, oh, that the idea of traveling together had never come to pass! Because, stuck in his corporality, he was one more body among other bodies, nothing more … but at the same time here he was … and somehow here he was, distinctly and unremittingly. … This was not to be dismissed—not to be discarded, disposed of, erased. Here he was in this crush and here he was. … And his ride, his onward rush in space, was beyond comparison with their ride—his was a much more significant ride, even sinister perhaps. …
From time to time he smiled at me and said something—probably just to make it bearable for me to be with him and make his presence less oppressive. I realized that pulling him out of the city, casting him onto these out-of-Warsaw spaces, was a risky undertaking … because, against the background of these expanses, his singular inner quality would necessarily resound more powerfully … and he himself knew it, since I had never seen him more subdued, insignificant. At a certain moment the dusk, the substance that consumes form, began gradually to erase him, and he became indistinct in the speeding and shaking train that was riding into the night, inducing nonexistence. Yet this did not weaken his presence, which became merely less accessible to the eye: he lurked behind the veil of nonseeing, still the same. Suddenly lights came on and pulled him back into the open, exposing his chin, the corners of his tightly drawn mouth, his ears. … He, nonetheless, did not twitch, he stood with his eyes fixed on a string that was swaying, and he just was! The train stopped again, somewhere behind me the shuffling of feet, the crowd reeling, something must be happening—and he just was and was! We begin moving, it’s night outside, the locomotive flares out sparks, the compartments’ journey becomes nocturnal—why on earth have I brought him with me? Why have I burdened myself with his company, which, instead of unburdening me, burdened me? The journey lasted many listless hours, interspersed with stops, until finally it became a journey for journey’s sake, somnolent, stubborn, and so we rode until we reached Ćmielowo and, with our suitcases, we found ourselves on a footpath running along the train track, the train’s disappearing string of cars in the clangor dying away. Then silence, a mysterious breeze, and stars. A cricket.
I, extricated from many hours of motion, of crowding, was suddenly set down on this little footpath—next to me Fryderyk, his coat on his arm, totally silent and standing—Where were we? What was this? I knew this area, the breeze was not foreign to me—but where were we? There, diagonally across, was the familiar building of the Ćmielowo train station and a few lamps shining, yet … where, on what planet, had we landed? Fryderyk stood next to me and just stood. We began to move toward the station, he behind me, and here are a carriage, horses, a coachman—the familiar carriage and the coachman’s familiar raising of his cap, why then am I watching it all so stubbornly? … I climb up, Fryderyk after me, we ride, a sandy road by the light of a dark sky, the blackness of a tree or of a bush floats in from the sides, we drive into the village of Brzustowa, the boards glow with whitewash, a dog is barking … mysterious … in front of me the coachman’s back … mysterious … and next to me this man who is silently, affably accompanying me. The invisible ground at times rocked our vehicle, at times shook it, while caverns of darkness, the thickening murkiness among the trees, obstructed our vision. I talked to the coachman just to hear my own voice:
“Well, how’s it going? Is it peaceful over your way?”
And I heard him say:
“It’s peaceful for the moment. There are gangs in the forests. … But nothing special lately. …”
The face invisible, the voice the same—yet not the same. In front of me only his back—and I was about to lean forward to look into the eyes of his back, but I stopped short … because Fryderyk … was indeed here, next to me. And he was immensely silent. With him next to me, I preferred not to look anyone in the face … because I suddenly realized that this something sitting next to me is radical in its silence, radical to the point of frenzy! Yes, he was an extremist! Reckless in the extreme! No, this was not an ordinary being but something more rapacious, strained by an extremity about which thus far I had no idea! So I preferred not to look in the face—of anyone, not even the coachman’s, whose back weighed me down like a mountain, while the invisible earth rocked the carriage, shook it, and the surrounding darkness, sparkling with stars, sucked out all vision. The remainder of the journey passed without a word. We finally rolled into an avenue, the horses moved more briskly—then the gate, the caretaker, and the dogs—the locked house and the heavy grating of its unlocking—Hipolit with a lamp …
“Well, thank God you’re here!”
Was it he or not? The bloated redness of his cheeks, bursting, struck me and repelled me. … He seemed to be generally bursting with edema, which made everything in him expand enormously and grow in all directions, the awful blubber of his body was like a volcano disgorging flesh … in knee boots, he stretched out his apocalyptic paws, and his eyes peeped from his body as if through a porthole. Yet he wanted to be close to me, he hugged me. He whispered bashfully:
“I’m all bloated … devil only knows … I’ve grown fat. From what? Probably from everything.”
And looking at his thick fingers he repeated with boundless anguish, more softly, to himself:
“I’ve grown fat. From what? Probably from everything.”
Then he bellowed:
“And this is my wife!”
Then he muttered for his own benefit:
“And this is my wife.”
Then he screamed:
“And this is my Henia, Hennie, Hennie-girl!”
Then he repeated, to himself, barely audibly:
“And this is Henia, Hennie, Hennie-girl!”
He turned to us, hospitably, his manner refined: “How good of you to come, but please, Witold, introduce me to your friend …” He stopped, closed his eyes, and kept repeating … his lips moved. Fryderyk, courteous in the extreme, kissed the hand of the hostess, whose melancholy was embellished with a faraway smile, whose litheness fluttered lightly … and the whirl of connecting, introducing us into the house, sitting, conversing, drew us in—after that journey without end—the light of the lamp induced a dreamy mood. Supper, served by a butler. We were overcome with sleep. Vodka. Struggling against sleep, we tried to listen, to grasp, there was talk of aggravation by the Underground Army on the one hand, by the Germans on the other, by gangs, by the administration, by the Polish police, and seizures—talk of rampant fears and rapes … to which the shutters, secured with additional iron bars, bore witness, as did the blockading of side doors … the locking and bunging up with iron. “They burned down Sieniechów, they broke the legs of the overseer of the farm laborers in Rudniki, I had people here who were displaced from the Poznań region, what’s worse, we know nothing of what’s happening in Ostrowiec, in Bodzechów with its factory settlements, everybody’s just waiting, ears to the ground, for the time being it’s quiet, but everything will come crashing down when the front comes closer … Crashing down! Well, sir, there will be carnage, an eruption, ugly business! It will be an ugly business!” he bellowed and then muttered to himself, absorbed in thought:
“An ugly business.”
And he bellowed:
“The worst of it is there’s no place to run!”
And he whispered:
“The worst of it is there’s no place to run!”
But here’s the lamp. Supper. Sleepiness. Hipolit’s enormousness besmeared with a thick sauce of sleep, the lady of the house is here as well, dissolving in her remoteness, and Fryderyk, and moths hitting the lamp, moths inside the lamp, moths around the lamp, and the stairs winding upward, a candle, I fall onto my bed, I’m falling asleep. The following day there’s a triangle of sunlight on the wall. Someone’s voice outside the window. I rose from my bed and opened the shutters. Morning.
*
p.s. Hey. ** H, Hi. Oh, thank you, I'll go read Brian Olewnick's review. Understood about the Brainard. No apologies necessary. I like Xmas, not as much as I used to when it seemed like magic. But Paris is never more beautiful than when it's very cold here and everything is done up for that holiday. I really look forward to that. ** Pascal, Hi, P. Wait, you mentioned that novel here before because I remember the title 'Now Legwarmers' because I like it so much. Long time to wait for it, but I'll wait. Let the thumb twiddling begin. 'The Messy Novel' isn't a bad title. Just sayin'. I'm gearing up to get back to my novel-in-progress and looking for the soonest opportunity because I'm very anxious to finish it. For now, I have 'assignments' to do, like a TV series script to be directed by Gisele that I'm co-writing with Zac, and 'fix it' work on the script for Zac's and my next film, and a couple of other things. All good and interesting projects, but I do miss my novel. Interesting that you haven't found Genet's work the pleasure in person that you'd imagined until maybe now. Huh. That's exciting. I mean, as a fan of his, it's exciting to think of coming to him in a discovery sort of way. Me too, on a London screening. We're going to start seeing what we can sort out on that front very soon. And awesome, obviously, about 'Escape'! I'm with you, buddy, duh. ** Aaron Mirkin, Hi, A. Oh, that's A-okay. Yeah, let's sort out a talking time and method soon. I just got the new OPN album, and am just digging in, and I love it so far. I did see that video, yeah. Nuts indeed, in the great way. Thanks, Aaron. ** Sypha, Interesting. Blogger or Google or whatever is responsible for the auto-correction function here seems to have just learned that word days ago, annoyingly, ha ha. ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, I wish. But every time I wish that, I always remember that 'Twilight Zone' episode where a kid wished it was Xmas ever day, and he got his wish, and the world became torturous. ** Bernard Welt, Hi. B. Oh, sweet, please, pretty please, re: your thought of turning the Uncanny stuff into a post. Oh, huh, interesting, thank you. I mean about 'way of life' and all of that. Wow, that Casper thing rings such a bell, but I don't know where that bell is. At the end of a google trail, perhaps. Sweet of Chrystel. Yeah, I checked in on her a couple of days ago. All seemed fairly well. Well, do come next summer. I mean, seriously, is there even a fraction of a reason not to? The sadness here re: what happened has a very odd tone, I think because the city is already starting to do itself up for Xmas, and there's some of chemical reaction going on between the immediate past and people's memory of the immediate future. You would find it very interesting. Wow, no fucking shit that the US is going insane. Retarded and insane at the same time. I mean, over here, people on almost every strata apart from the far right immediately get that the goal was to create a backlash again the refugees. The vast majority here are able to see the absolute logic there. But in the States ...? Seen from over here? Jesus Christ. I sure hope you're right about the turning from the church, others against the outbreak of cowardice/denial/blah blah over there. Christ. ** Steevee, Yay! Warmth! I've only heard a track or two off the new Wolf Eyes so far, and I've been wanting to do a full investigation. That sounds promising. Thanks, man. ** James, Hi. My theory is that it is in fact Halloween every day of the year and that my heart just seems to have a beeline to the truth. Oh, yeah, expensive. There's probably a pdf out there somewhere maybe. If you were in LA, you could pop by my place and borrow mine. ** Scunnard, Oh, right, the Biennale, that makes sense. Never been to that thing. It's got to be fun to just walk around and find everything in and of itself. Mekas was in a Burger King? What a peculiar and strangely apt idea. Anyway, nice, very nice. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. Yay, someone mentioned something in the post specifically! You get the gold star today. It's a very stylin' gold star too, even if it is invisible. It doesn't take a lamb very long to shake its tail at all in my experience, so that's very exciting news! ** Misanthrope, Hi. Well, of course it's boring. Well, okay, I don't think it's boring exactly. I think with stuff like that you have to think about it as a calculation on someone's part to put out something that will fit in with all the mediocrity out there while containing within it a slight dash of something or other that causes those who love mediocrity to say, like, 'I hear a very slight twist in this song! And I consequently must buy it!', and my feeling upon hearing the song was that, between a successfully accomplished combo of utter familiarity and a slight twist, and taking into account the context of what Bieber has represented to this point, that it was a fairly successful move on the Bieber handlers' part. I like saying and thinking 'duh', so bring it on. ** Armando, Hey. St. Denis is a city that's often considered to be and spoken about as a suburb of Paris because that's what big cities do to small cities that have the misfortune/fortune of being situated very close by. It's not very close to me. A half-hour or so metro ride. All is okay in my vicinity as of right now, knock on wood. Love, me. ** Okay. I thought I would draw your attention to this great novel by the great Witold Gombrowicz today. How successfully did I do that? See you tomorrow.