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Look, Polish novelists who stop by here. In case I’m not making myself clear enough: you have to re-read your books to make sure they make sense. Jack Kerouac can write a book in one non-stop draft, but you’re not Jack Kerouac. Today’s offender is Marek Krajewski, in his Festung Breslau. His attention to the cartography of World War Two Wroc?aw (the Breslau of the title) is remarkable. It turns out that the Lindner factory was opposite the former shelter for the homeless.

But not everything happens above ground. Two characters go into the underground world of Wroc?aw. I mean literally underground: in the novel there is a network of spacious corridors beneath the city streets; not narrow, fetid tunnels of stinking sewage but tunnels able to accomodate a motorcycle. It’s not with the frankly fantastic idea of a second Wroc?aw existing beneath the ground (the tunnels conveniently follow the street plan) that the problem arises. Suspension of disbelief and all that, and besides, maybe it’s true. What do I know? The problem is with the motorcycle. Noisy old contraptions, motorbikes, especially in enclosed spaces, like, say, underground tunnels. Krajewski realises this, writing:

…dojechali po dziesi?ciu minutach jazdy w og?uszaj?cym huku silnika, zwielokrotnionym przez puste korytarze.
…they got there after a ten minute journey accompanied by the deafening roar of the engine, multiplied by the empty corridor.

Go back just one page and you find the motorcyclist (still underground) kick-starting the engine and continuing unhindered his conversation with a third character.

I wonder if it’s because of word processors. Perhaps the idea of first, second, third drafts has gone, replaced by one, rolling, continuous — clearly inadequate — re-write, during which the author never gets the necessary distance from his precious baby to see such glaring errors. Either that or editors are not being paid enough.

Traktat o ?uskaniu fasoli (Treatise on shelling beans) is the title of Wies?aw My?liwski’s latest book. It takes that most self-indulgence-prone form of a monologue (delivered to a stranger). In one passage from the essay — errr, novel — the narrator describes an incident from his childhood. Children can be so cruel some times, and this being Polish literature, this is most definitely one of those times. The children play a “game” in which the loser has to do whatever he is told by the winners. Note the cunning here (My?liwski certainly does): there is no one winner, only one loser. The consequences of losing are so awful that one child jumps through a (closed) window and another takes refuge by diving into the latrine, almost drowning in his fellows’ fecal matter in the process. Happy, happy days! The great romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, wrote a wistful verse once in which he described his childhood as “sielskie, anielskie” (idyllic, angelic) and it would seem Polish writers ever since have been trying to outdo each other in showing how well hard and unromantic their childhoods were in comparison with that of their national poet. Back to My?liwski:

In other words, the point of the game was not to win, as is the object of all other games.

All other games? This comes directly after discussing, among other games, two-player games, in some of which winning means not losing, i.e exactly the same as in My?liwski’s “unique” game. Only a lot more fun.

Tadeusz Konwicki (80 years old today), author of Mala Apokalypsa (Minor Apocalypse, translated by Richard Lourie), is a very good writer indeed, on a par with DH Lawrence. Set during the war, Kilka dni wojny, o ktorej nie wiadomo czy byla (literally: A Few Days in a War About Which it is not Known if it Was) is about a man who calls himself Adam Karnowski and is escaping from the Germans. The book challenges facile notions of literature and experience. Here is a conversation between Karnowski and a boy he meets who is also on the run:

“It will be cold in the morning.”
“My friend used to live in these parts. We went to secondary school together.”
“A lot of people who are known [literally: wielu znanych ludzi] live here. But now they are all equal. Few will survive.”
“Do you think I will survive?”
The boy was silent for a long time.
“You know, I am an orphan. Everyone envies me. They say: it’s well for you. You’re an orphan.”

In times of war, conversation rises above the petty babble of everyday life. The desire to touch on essential matters outweighs the peacetime habit we have of answering each other’s questions. Instead, we respond to our own internal drives and motivations. In times of great mental stress we also dispense with the empty formalities normally used to end conversations:

“It’s time to sleep,” the boy repeated.
“I’ll probably never fall asleep again. But before, before…”
“What before?”
“No, nothing. Not before or after. For ever.”
The dog fell silent and waited to see what they would do. Karnowski returned to the cellar…”

And that’s it: if they do say goodnight or goodbye or sweet dreams, Konwicki does not waste our time with the banality of it. As was famously the case in telephone conversations in Miami Vice, no one says “goodbye”: in times of stress you instinctively know that a conversation is over.

As Hemingway shows, one is never so much alive as when one is close to death. And so a short conversation with a stranger can assume a much greater significance than would otherwise be the case. The next day Karnowski sees a boy “not much older than the one he had gone through the night with.” In fact they only exchanged a few sentences and they did not sleep in the same place.

As you read Kilka dni wojny, o ktorej nie wiadomo czy byla it becomes clear that Konwicki has abandoned the conventions of realism. This is Theatre of the Absurd: as in Beckett, the action is inaction (Karnowski is on the run but he goes nowhere); in dialogue there is no dialectal exchange; normal animal needs are secondary and absurd (Estragon gnaws the chicken bones but Vladimir seems to feel no hunger; Karnowski eats berries and “potato tart”); people’s actions are apparently inexplicable (Karnowski by turns avoids passers by and by turns greets them). There is much too of Pinters’ Theatre of Menace: the Germans are a constant threat and yet in true absurd fashion, Karnowski at one point goes up to some German soldiers and greets them with impunity.

But Beckett’s break with realistic narrative was rather crude. Konwicki is more subtle. He only abandons some of realism’s tyrannical demand for versimilitude and plausibility. In Waiting for Godot the stage is set with a minimum of detail. Not in Konwicki. Beckett’s sparse descriptions are countered by Konwicki’s attention to the detail of Lithuanian flora and fauna, using many doubtless dialect words - like Mickiewicz’s before him - which will not easily be found in a standard Polish dictionary. And where Beckett’s characters rely on a small stock of vocabulary, Konwicki uses much better words than ordinary people. I’m thinking here of “lecz” instead of “ale” (but); “mnogosc” instead of, say, “mnostwo” (large amount of); “raptownie” instead of “nagle” (suddenly); and “jac” (commence, set about) instead of — well, most writers omit it altogether. Three of those four words are marked “bookish” in the dictionary.

Nor does Konwicki allow himself to get bogged down in the petty attention to detail that has made a mere story teller of many a great writer. Two Germans passing by (on this occassion Karnowski hides) “talked animatedly about their families or about the prostitutes…” Which were they talking about? Is this Karnowski’s guess or Konwicki’s deliberate withholding of evidence? We may never know. Consider also this description of a man and his bodygaurd and its contemptuous attitude to merely external reality: “The men passed by, tense, alert, not looking around.” The men are alert (czujni: also means “vigilant”) and yet they do not look around. This is an inner alertness. Or again, in Karnowski’s daydream about having sex on the Orient Express with a woman (despite her rather unconvincing protests) he wakes up the next day to find her gone, with just a faintly visible smear of lipstick on the pillow. A plodding realist might first have asked his lover if she often goes to sleep sober with her lipstick on, thus ruining the beautiful image that Konwicki conjures up from the smear of lipstick: “a pink streak like the oft reflected reflection of the morning daybreak” (”rozowa smuge jak odbity wielokroc refleks porannej zorzy.”)

Konwicki frequently skips from first person narrative to third person. Third person narrative dominates but, especially when Karnowski is fantasising about having sex with Ewa, the unwilling woman he meets at a roadside shop, the first person creeps in. It as if Konwicki wanted you to identify Karnowski with himself as he has sex with Ewa. (Konwicki/Karnowski is no crude, undiscrimating sex maniac though — although he falls immediately under Ewa’s spell, he does notice that her legs are not as slim as they should be.) Sometimes the change in narrative form is quite abrupt indeed, as in the following passage, a conversation between Karnowski and the boy mentioned earlier:

“What do you know?”
“As much as you do. And maybe even more.”
The dog lay down between us on the grass, in which were sparkling the first drops of evening dew. Another troop transport rolled echoingly down below in the dark. One should be on one’s guard, he thought. Be careful of this suburban philosopher.” (emphasis added).

Most radical of all, though, is Konwicki’s use of second-person narrative, familiar to readers of John Fowles, David Malouf, Julian Barnes and Bill Manhire (The Brain of Katherine Mansfield). When Karnowski starts fantasising about having sex with the gently protesting Ewa on the Orient Express the narrative changes to first person but it does not stay that way:

Afterwards we would lie beside each other, sweaty and weak. I would listen to the slowing pulse in my temples and she would set to [jelaby] stroking my ruffled hair. [...] The next day we would get off the train and never see each other again. After all, you don’t know me and I don’t know you. Not true you [masculine pronoun] would murmur into her ear, not true, though maybe it is true.

Who says “though maybe it is true”? Konwicki? Karnowski? You? Ingenious, is it not?

Anhelli by Juliusz S?owacki tells of a mystic journey undertaken by the eponymous hero and his guide, a shaman, around Siberia, to which many Poles were deported after their failed revolt in 1830. It’s an unintentionally hilarious classic of nineteenth century Polish romantic literature. At one point Anhelli and the shaman meet people carrying coffins from a Siberian prison. Anhelli entreats the shaman to work a miracle and wake one of the dead, whom he recognises. (The footnotes in my edition identify the man as Wincenty Niemojowski, brother of Bonawentura.) The shaman replies: “I shall raise him and you will kill him again. Verily, and I shall raise him twice and he shall receive death from you twice.” (I did say it was mystic.) The shaman resurrects the man, who doesn’t get to say anything before Anhelli unintentionally kills him by repeating lies spread by the Russians about the deceased after his death — of which, of course, he had been unaware.

The shaman resurrects Niemojowski again, first saying to Anhelli: “and you beware not to cause him death again.” Anhelli says to the resurrected man:

Forgive me, for I knew not that I was speaking calumny and slander. I saw you in the National Council with your brother and I saw your two heads always together with a whiteness like unto that of two doves that fly down together for millet [...] Oh unhappy brothers! One of you seeks eternal repose in a Syberian cemetery and the other lies under the roses and cypresses by the banks of the Seine. Unfortunate doves - separated and dead.

The unfortunate dove cries out “My brother!” and dies again. The shaman says to Anhelli — and here I will paraphrase lightly, rather than translate: What did you want to go and tell him his brother was dead for?

The title of this piece comes from Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke: “Dlaczego S?owacki wzbudza w nas zachwyt i mi?o??? (…) Dlatego, panowie, ?e S?owacki wielkim poet? by?!” (”Why does S?owacki kindle in us admiration and love? (…) Because, gentlemen, S?owacki was a great poet!”)