The Meaning of Recognition (18 page)

Perhaps he is worn out from trying to ride two horses at once. After it turned out that a few of Schulz’s murals had survived after all, Ficowski was on the spot, and understandably put
out, when agents of Yad Vashem intervened to pack up some of the most precious fragments and ship them back to Israel. A cultural version of the Raid on Entebbe, the caper raised not only a scandal
but a false question: had Schulz been a Pole or a Jew? Ficowski, surely rightly, wants Schulz to be both, but runs a danger of tipping the balance if he puts too much emphasis on the possibility
that his country might have been, in the recent past, a bad host to the writer’s memory. It isn’t now, of course, but the recent past refuses to lie down and die, and for the less
recent past that goes double. Doomed to the margins in an anti-Semitic culture, weren’t the Jews oppressed even before the Nazis got there? Wasn’t Schulz a born victim?

He probably was, but not in the historical sense. Frustratingly missing in the area already noted, Ficowski’s sense of history is present and correct where it matters most: he sees the
Drohobycz
shtetl
of Schulz’s childhood as a creative incubator, and not just as a trap. Drohobycz was in the old Galicia, so Schulz was born and raised under the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. Until the Russians moved in and made it part of the Ukraine, his home town was part of a civilization. For Jews, that civilization certainly had its difficulties, but the coming nightmare
kept nobody awake, because it seemed unthinkable. Jews had a future. Schulz’s helpless fatalism has to be sought in his personality, and it is too much to assume that his personality was
determined by his circumstances, or else we would have to say that his talent was too. The fatalism and the talent went together.

Part of the fatalism was a counter-productive propensity to be a good man at every moment, with never a thought for his own long-term interests. The boy who was caught by his mother feeding
flies so that they would be safe for the winter grew to be the man who would give all he had to a beggar. He gave everything of himself, as if there were no tomorrow. (There wasn’t, but not
even Hitler was sure of that yet.) As an art teacher, Schulz would enthral his pupils with his chalk-talk stories, caring for them far beyond the demands of the job, and consuming the time he might
have spent on his own art. He was consumed by the moment in the same way that his attention was consumed by an object. It was a miracle that he got anything at all drawn or written. He always
needed someone to discover him because he had no energy left over with which to discover himself.
Cinnamon Shops
began in his letters to a woman friend, Debora Vogel. Without her, the book
might never have happened. Women looked after him because he so obviously needed to be mothered. In his graphic work the dominatrix was omnipresent, and the figure most like him was usually on its
knees. (All the women were real: when he drew them nude, their husbands recognized them, and raised a ruckus.) His life was like that. The trap was in his mind. To call him a Jewish historic victim
is to diminish him, the Jews and history itself, which shrinks to a cartoon when read through hindsight, thereby encouraging the hopeless notion that the Jews of Europe were born only in order to
die. But they were born in order to live: hence the tragedy.

Even with his tremendous powers of hesitation, Schulz managed to become a member of the Polish Academy of Letters. By the time of his real entrapment, he was famous enough for other literary
notables to attempt a rescue. He might have got away, but typically he was unable to face the choice. The choice might have come down to the impossible decisions involved in packing a bag: socks
first, or a spare sweater? He was like that. By giving us the man in all his frailty, Ficowski has helped to explain the artist in all his strength, but for the full measure of that strength we
need to see those brilliant little books.

Theodosia Robertson promises us a new translation of them, done by herself: apparently the full etymological depth of the prose will be brought out. Some excerpts from her work in progress can
be read in this volume. Since too much incorporated scholarship could only put the text further out of reach, one is glad to note that the extracts do not look very different from the same passages
in Celina Wienewska’s established renditions, most attractively available in
The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz
that was published in London by Picador in 1998. Recklessly lavish in
its production standards, the book cost a whopping £50 sterling at the time and it was a commercial flop. I got my copy in a remainder shop for a pittance, and no doubt it can be picked up
reasonably cheaply on the web. Edited by Ficowski and prefaced by David Grossman at his most eloquent, it is a truly beautiful book, appropriate to its subject in everything but its physical
dimensions. Essentially a miniaturist writer, Schulz looks a bit lost in so monumental a volume, but there is an upside: there is room to reproduce his marvellous graphic work at its full value,
and the book would be worth having if only for its colour reproduction of the single easel painting we know exists. Painted in 1920, it is called ‘Encounter: a young Jew and two women in an
alley’. From that one page alone, you can see that Schulz had absorbed the whole tradition of European painting, and would undoubtedly have added to it if his pictures had survived. Luckily
the wave of history that rolled over images found it harder to wipe out words, and Bruno Schulz the writer is always with us. He is just a bit hard to get at. This biography helps.

Los Angeles Times Book Review
, 3 November 2002

Postscript

The story of Bruno Schulz is the necessary corrective to the story of
The Pianist
. In telling the story of a single talented person being saved by chance, Polanski was
being as bleak as he could be and still make a movie. A movie about Bruno Schulz would have to end with the star being shot through the head. Nobody would finance such a project. Schulz’s
story offers no consolation except that he at least lived long enough to prove that he was a genius. But at this point Michael Burleigh would step in to remind us that when we tell stories of great
talents being arbitrarily murdered, we are once again courting sentimentality. As Primo Levi saw so clearly, the real story is about the extinction meted out to whole populations of ordinary
people, not just to a few extraordinary ones. By that measure, every famous example misleads. Somewhere in the centre of this question is the point where the critic of the arts finds himself
involved in modern politics whether he likes the idea or not. Artistic creativity is not the only thing in life. There are, or were, millions of lives that created nothing to last except the memory
of a considerable existence, a moral continuity far more precious than all the beautiful things that have ever been made. A critic who can’t see how artistic creativity is only a part of a
much larger creation is trivializing his subject by the way he concentrates on it. When he does so incorrigibly, we call him an aesthete. It isn’t that the aesthete is too serious about the
artistic: he isn’t serious enough about what gives rise to it.

Frank Kermode’s latest collection of essays,
Pleasing Myself
, should please a lot of other people too, but strictly on the quiet. In real life, Frank Kermode is
softly spoken. An interlocutor does best to get as close as possible, so as not to miss a word. Many of the words are not Kermode’s: they are quoted from writers he admires, and most of those
are poets. The poets, could they be present, would be pleased to hear their lines pronounced with such a fine regard for rhythm, balance, sense and nuance.
Shakespeare’s Language
,
Kermode’s last book before this, was justly hailed by its reviewers as the ideal critical tribute to the way the greatest of all poets actually wrote. It wasn’t hard to imagine
Shakespeare hailing it too. After all, the book brought him alive.

This new collection of essays works the same revivifying trick for poets of the twentieth century: Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Empson, Marianne Moore, Henry Reed and Roy Fuller are among them. Most of
the essays are book reviews, and most of the books reviewed are books on: writing about writing. So this is writing about writing about writing. But Kermode is a practised hand at getting back
through the layers of commentary to the ignition point of the gaseous expansion. In the beginning, somebody said something inspired, and this artist among critics already has it in his memory. For
Kermode, language comes first. If a writer can actually write, here is a critic who can tell. The guarantee is that he writes so well himself.

Some reviewers were surprised that Kermode showed such a talent for narrative in his memoir
Not Entitled
. They shouldn’t have been: he has always shown it. Some of his earlier
books had grand, over-arching themes, but a knack for vividly recounting the events was always in plain sight. The first thing he looks for in art is a quality he possesses, and although he is too
modest to think it sufficient in his own case, he is confident enough to call it a necessity in others. If they’ve got that, there is much else they can safely lack. Reviewing Roy
Foster’s first volume of the Yeats biography, Kermode ought to be two steps away from the poetry, but he is instantly in the poet’s mind, which he knows to be a jumble sale. Foster is
given credit for annotating the detritus: sooner or later we have to know about the Order of the Golden Dawn. But later is better.

First we have to know what Kermode knows: ‘he had the ability to make all his interests coalesce . . .’ In other words, you don’t need the bric-a-brac to get at the talent: it
is because of the talent that you might want to get at the bric-a-brac. If we want to know who Maud Gonne was, and whether or not Yeats ever managed to get her into bed, it should be because of
‘The Cold Heaven’. Calling it ‘his finest lyric’ of the early period, Kermode speaks with authority, and not as the scribes. Recently, at a black-tie dinner in King’s
College, Cambridge, I heard him recite it by heart. ‘Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven . . .’ It was very easy to imagine Yeats there, pleased that his articulated
sweet sounds were being so well respected. If he could have heard a performance like that on his All Souls’ Night, he might have thought that a living man can drink from the whole wine after
all.

On Eliot’s ‘missing’ Clark lectures, Kermode makes an apparently peripheral remark about what Eliot did, or did not do, for Donne: ‘there are a few, but too few,
instances of close literary criticism, nose to text, brisk, arguable and fun’. Kermode is personally qualified to say that on all counts, but he is on his way to making a central point:
Eliot’s reasons for getting away from close literary criticism are the wrong ones. Eliot says the Brunetto Latini episode in the
Inferno
has a ‘rational necessity’ that
Shakespeare’s Octavius doesn’t command when he talks about Cleopatra’s corpse. Kermode quotes both passages and sees a difference: one is by Dante and the other by Shakespeare.
‘But it would be hard to agree that the difference is about “rational necessity”’. And indeed it would. Eliot’s big idea about rational necessity was part of his even
bigger idea about the dissociation of sensibility. Kermode, by staying with the poetry, has taken Eliot’s big ideas apart. The implication is that ‘close literary criticism, nose to the
text’ is a big idea in itself, and the only one that counts, because it alone can bring everything in, including the irreducible fact of the individual voice.

Kermode once wrote a book about Wallace Stevens. Now an essay on Marianne Moore shows that he remains as pleased as ever about the American moderns. They had ‘this dispersity’: they
were individuals, not a movement. Marianne Moore’s poems are an extension of the principle she had been taught at Bryn Mawr: to find a disciplined way of doing as she pleased. ‘Anything
can get into them, including all the chosen pleasures of her life, the ball games and prize fights, the paintings and the exotic animals. To an extraordinary degree she did, though with great
labour, exactly as she liked.’ The way he makes the pleasures ‘chosen’ is an instance of how Kermode can switch on a single extra light bulb and show you a new corridor. To serve
the purpose, poets can choose even their passions. The crunch comes only when the choice wrecks the work.

Empson chose to be difficult. He made things difficult for himself with Continental rhyme-schemes fiercely demanding in a rhyme-poor language like English; and he made things difficult for the
reader by deploying a range of reference beyond any imaginable single encyclopaedia. Kermode is well equipped to follow up the references, but he makes sure always to follow them in a circle, so
that you end up at what really matters about Empson: the compulsively memorable, singing lines whose simplicity the complication is there to protect. The protection was against himself. An appeal
for sympathy would have cheapened his feelings, so he put the feelings almost beyond appreciation, as a beggar selling matches might paint a miniature on every box and price them at a thousand
pounds each.

Once again, Kermode is the ideal appreciator because he is the ideal reciter. Empson had a way with a pentameter that made even the unstressed syllables prominent, and he would be glad to know
that at least one of his readers, having got the lines by heart, doesn’t miss a beat. ‘Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills’. I heard that line while our wine glasses
were being refilled, and its companion while we were contemplating an overly challenging modern dessert of frozen oxtail soup arranged to look like hazelnut sorbet. ‘The waste remains, the
waste remains and kills.’ Kermode knows exactly why ‘Missing Dates’ is a great poem even with its faults, although he himself, for once, can be faulted here. With typical
generosity he borrows and acknowledges John Wain’s tribute to Empson’s ‘great reverberating lines’, but follows Wain too readily in supposing that the dog’s
‘exchange rills’ are dragged in. The rhyme might very well seem strained, but there is no guarantee that the poem didn’t start from there. It takes a more than usually complete
set of worksheets to tell us which rhyme-word triggered the chain reaction. Empson might have seen ‘rills’ first and come up with ‘fills’ and ‘kills’ later.
(That would be an explanation for why the key line is written backwards: ‘Slowly the poison fills the whole blood stream’ would have been just as Empsonian, especially with its
clinching spondee.) With a mind like Empson’s, you never know. But it remains true that you can’t begin to know what his mind is unless you hear the sonorities first, as he did.