Odd Jobs (138 page)

To Schulz’s mind, primed by a Germanic mixture of Freud and Rilke, “Language is man’s metaphysical organ.” His brief essay “The Mythologizing of Reality” argues, decades before McLuhan, that the medium, language, is the message, delivering “Meaning or Sense” like some archetypal memory: “the word in its common usage today is only a fragment, remnant of some former all-embracing, integral mythology.” “Philosophy is actually philology,” not in the reductive sense that the old philosophical questions can be reduced to semantic confusions, but in the expansive sense of “the deep, creative exploration of the word”—“the primal word, the word that was not yet a sign but myth, story, sense.” We resist, perhaps, the mystical connotations of “primal word” (Schulz speaks of its “shimmering aura” and cites the Biblical “In the beginning was the Word”), but we should have no problem with the more pragmatic assertions that “the nameless does not exist for us” and “what is put into words is already half under control.” This potent act of taming gives Schulz’s language its reverent urgency, the solemn thickness of its magical conjurations. In an essay on himself written for the poet and editor Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Schulz said, “The role of art is to be a probe sunk into the nameless. The artist is an apparatus for registering processes in that deep stratum where value is formed.” The difference between art and philosophy “is not that art is a crossword puzzle with the key hidden, and philosophy the same crossword puzzle solved.
The difference lies deeper than that. In a work of art the umbilical cord linking it with the totality of our concerns has not yet been severed, the blood of the mystery still circulates; the ends of the blood vessels vanish into the surrounding night and return from it full of dark fluid.”

The image is typically visceral: Schulz in his fiction everywhere strives to physicalize the immaterial, rendering atmospheres into “plasmas,” showing skies to be weighty accumulations, thickening and slowing the passage of appearances so that the reader becomes sleepy with the heavy verbal richness. It is as in his “Autumn,” published here for the first time in English:

Images crowd toward virtual gridlock, a frozen carnival of gnarled accuracies:

Schulz’s drawings and
cliché-verre
etchings—over fifty are reproduced here, at a generally stingy size, in a busy, choppy format full of photographs and border lines—have relatively little of this passionate reification. They accept conventions of doll-like stylization in depicting women, and most of the men look like Schulz in his photographs—twisted and foreshortened as if by some unconscious evasive maneuver. Though skillful and earnest in their fashion, the drawings also seem wooden and constrained, falling short of the pornography implicit in their ambience of deshabille, whips, and greasy hatching. Juliusz Flaszen, an acquaintance, recalled of Schulz in the late Twenties, “He was morbidly shy; I was right, I think, in setting him down as suffering from an inferiority complex. One day he brought along his paintings and drawings
and asked for my opinion. The great part of this work consisted of pen and pencil sketches which in their thematics and technique recalled [Félicien] Rops. The chief motif was male sexual enslavement to the beautiful contours of the female body.” One etching, from a cycle titled
A Book of Idolatry
, shows a naked woman, attended by a winged minion and elevated upon a fanciful couch, pressing her bare foot down into the face of a male adorer in suit and shoes. Others show men crawling and crouching on the floor, and half transformed into beasts. Schulz’s work was admired, and his exhibits nearly always sold out—“at wretched prices,” Flaszen added. “His self-esteem was so low that he always feared to overcharge.” Schulz’s graphic skills continued to serve him in darker times. After Drohobycz was occupied by the Soviets in 1939, local authorities commissioned from Schulz, according to an editorial note, “portraits of Stalin and scenes symbolizing the joys of annexation, painted in the obligatory manner of Socialist Realism.” When the Nazis moved in, his drawings were admired by a Gestapo agent, who hired Schulz to decorate his child’s bedroom with murals. In one version of his death, “he was shot in the street by a Gestapo officer who had a grudge against another Nazi, Schulz’s temporary ‘protector’ who liked his paintings.”
^§
He was killed out of spite, like a pet dog.

The horrors of German rule over Poland permeate this book of remnants; its scraps of salvaged correspondence smell of slaughter and incineration. Vast numbers of his letters perished in the Holocaust, as did most of his correspondents. Before the war, Schulz in his loneliness was a dedicated letter-writer. In 1936 he wrote to Romana Halpern, “It is a pity we didn’t know each other a few years ago; I was still able to write beautiful letters then. It was out of my letters that
Cinnamon Shops
[the literal title of
The Street of Crocodiles
] gradually grew. Most of these letters were addressed to Debora Vogel.” All of Schulz’s letters to Vogel, an avant-garde poet and novelist, have vanished, as have his letters to another early encourager, Wladyslaw Riff, and to Schulz’s fiancée, Józefina Szelinska,
and to “muses” (as Schulz called them) like Maria Chazen and Zofia Nalkowska, and to Thomas Mann, whom Schulz admired next only to Rilke and to whom he confided the manuscript of his one German-language narrative,
Die Heimkehr. Die Heimkehr
has vanished, as has
The Messiah
and all the trove of “papers, notes, and correspondence” which Schulz told Izydor Friedman he had deposited with a “Catholic outside the ghetto.” Friedman, one of the few witnesses to Schulz’s life to survive the war, claimed, “Unfortunately he did not give me the person’s name, or possibly I forgot it.” No advertisement or search has discovered the person, or the cache—though Ficowski has lately expressed to journalists his belief that
The Messiah
will still be found.

Only four letters survive of those written before the publication of Schulz’s first book in 1934. The surge of epistolary energy that helped create this book ebbed after its publication, though there are still flashes of poetic extravagance, of Schulz’s visionary materialization of feelings. To Tadeusz Breza he wrote in 1934, “People’s weakness delivers their souls to us, makes them needy. That loss of an electron ionizes them and renders them suitable for chemical bonding,” and, later in the year, “For you must realize that my nerves have been stretched thin like a net over the entire handicraft center, have crept along the floor, smothered the walls like tapestry and covered the shops and the smithy with a dense web.” His powers of expression revived in his last extended correspondence, with Ania Plockier, a young painter killed at the age of twenty-six by the Ukrainian militia. “More and more I have occasion to realize,” he told her, “that delight with the world, spasms of disinterested joy, are only forms of personal hope, generalized pictures of vitality projected onto the artist’s sensitivity.” And he managed now and then to toss off a Schulzian gem of description: “On one early autumn evening we wandered through the park in the rain and behind our backs the traffic of families, the most intimate family history, unfolded in lighted windows.”

But generally the surviving letters show him as a working man of letters, rather abjectly currying favor with the better-known, hinting to peers of possible literary favors they might bestow, seeking to wangle a leave from his depleting teaching post, complaining of writer’s block, lamenting his second book’s cool reception (“No one besides you has had one good thing to say about it”). To Romana Halpern he confessed, “It seems to me I have swindled the world by some sort of flash or glitter when there is nothing inside me.” His real writing—passionate, luminous, warped by its own destiny—he saved for publication, as in his almost
absurdly original afterword to a translation of Kafka’s
The Trial
, in an eloquent riposte to a challenge by Witold Gombrowicz’s and a warm review of Gombrowicz’s
Ferdydurke
, above all in the imaginative episodes waiting to take their place somewhere in the next book of fiction. The greatest letters, like those of Kafka and Keats, are written by those with few other outlets; the individual recipient becomes a public. The Schulz letters salvaged here are not, by and large, of this unstinted quality; he did, after 1934, have a literary public and a role to play—burdensome, perhaps, for one so basically private—within a vivacious, Polish cultural world that was about to be crushed.

BIOGRAPHIES

T
HE
N
IGHTMARE OF
R
EASON:
A Life of Franz Kafka
, by Ernst Pawel. 466 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.

The Nightmare of Reason
is full of information and intellectual energy and should be read by everyone who cares about Kafka; it fills in many of the gaps and firms up some of the soft spots in Max Brod’s indispensable but unavoidably personal biography of his friend, and offers a more contoured, searching version of the life than Ronald Hayman’s staccato
Kafka
, of two years ago. However, one wishes that Ernst Pawel had found a slightly different tone in which to write. His prose, like his title, comes on too strong; his literary voice, as it details the earthly adventures of his quiet, almost unfailingly tactful protagonist, echoes at times the “booming parade-ground voice” of that much-maligned father, Herrmann Kafka. There is something bullying and hectoring about Mr. Pawel’s approach as he boxes the young Kafka into a rather too classically Freudian Oedipal mess, with a coarse, crass father, a distant, distracted mother, two younger brothers both dead in infancy, and three little sisters to reinforce Franz’s emotional arrest. “The symbiotic entanglement with his family,” the biographer states in no uncertain terms, “the haunted pursuit of a mother lost to him along with two rivals killed by his own lethal fantasies, the obsessive struggle against the omnipotent father, spawned a rage so overpowering that it all but crippled his instincts and left him firmly locked in guilt beyond understanding.” Mr.
Pawel is, in his early pages, a dues-paying member of the “must have” school of biography: