In the summer of 1939, the writer Witold Gombrowicz set sail from Poland, on the ocean liner Chrobry, on what he thought would be a brief mission as a cultural ambassador to the Polish community in Argentina. He was not an obvious candidate for the job, having made his name as an eccentric irritant to the literary establishment. He was the author of a wildly surrealist collection of short stories; a dreamlike play, “Ivona, Princess of Burgundia,” which remained unperformed for decades after it was written; and a novel, “Ferdydurke,” which is now recognized as a masterpiece of twentieth-century world literature, but was dismissed by establishment critics at the time as “the ravings of a madman.”
A week after the Chrobry docked in Buenos Aires, Germany invaded Poland. The temporary emissary, who spoke no Spanish and had few local contacts, had little choice but to stay where he was. His exile lasted for more than two decades. Back home, his books were banned by the Nazis, and then, after 1945, by the Stalinists. In the rest of the world, they were merely unknown.
By 1952, when he pitched to Kultura, a prestigious Polish literary journal based in Paris, the idea of writing a diary for publication, Gombrowicz was demoralized and desperate. He had been living in isolation and obscurity for thirteen years. For a while he had worked at a bank, where the director gave him permission to write during business hours, but this cozy arrangement did not last long. The translation of “Ferdydurke” into Spanish, financed by a wealthy friend, had been ignored. Another novel, “Trans-Atlantic,” received plenty of attention in the Polish émigré community but did little to bolster Gombrowicz’s international reputation. Written in a hybridized, deliberately antiquated style rich with puns and double-entendres, the book was all but untranslatable. (An English version, ten years in the making, did not appear until 1994.) He needed to reinvent himself. “I have to create Gombrowicz the thinker, Gombrowicz the genius, Gombrowicz the cultural demonologist, and many other necessary Gombrowiczes,” he wrote to Kultura’s editor.
Under the heading “Fragments of a Diary,” the magazine published Gombrowicz’s provocative, idiosyncratic, highly personal musings from 1953 until his death, in 1969. In entries ranging from a few sentences to multiple pages, Gombrowicz recorded his daily routine, his diet, and his to-do lists; his reading, his travels, and his moods. He reproduced cantankerous letters to the editors of various publications; he fulminated against Communism, existentialism, and even democracy; he deployed elegant quips and humorous aphorisms. Most of all, he wrote about literature: he described in detail his writing process, explicated his own works, and railed against the deplorable state of the literary scene in Poland, in the émigré community, and virtually everywhere else. “People!” he exclaimed after reading a particularly obtuse critic on his work. “Cut my throat if you are told to, but not with such a dull, such a terribly dull, knife!” An immediate hit among Kultura’s readers, the diary was collected in three volumes by the magazine’s book division, but it was not legally sold in Poland until after his death, and even then only in censored form.
Now, for the first time, the complete “Diary” has been published in English, by Yale, in a heroic translation, by Lillian Vallee, that totals more than seven hundred pages. (Vallee’s versions of the three volumes appeared piecemeal between 1988 and 1993, but they have long been out of print.) English-speaking readers can finally experience the diary as Gombrowicz intended it—as a single, coherent work. On the face of it, Gombrowicz sought in the diary to revive Polish culture from the near-fatal blows dealt to it over the twentieth century. But he was equally concerned with saving himself.
The class of noble gentry into which Gombrowicz was born subscribed to a vision of Polishness that could be traced back at least to Boleslaw I Chrobry (“the Brave”), the ocean liner’s namesake and the first king of a unified Polish nation, at the turn of the first millennium. The family owned multiple estates, and his mother once served as president of the Society of Landed Ladies. But by 1904, when Gombrowicz was born, this class was on the verge of dying out; Polish independence, in 1918, and later occupations by the Nazis and the Soviets finished it off. In the diary, Gombrowicz describes himself as both “terribly Polish and terribly rebellious against Poland.” The once venerated traditional customs—honor, ceremoniousness, even duelling—struck him as hopelessly insincere. In response, he offered the absurd: if his mother said it was raining, he would claim the sun was shining. “This early training in evident falsehood and open preposterousness proved immensely useful in later years when I began to write,” he said later.
Through provocation, Gombrowicz believed, he could find his way to a more authentic form of life—surreal, perhaps, but more akin to reality than the privileged sphere of the aristocracy. “Within me a rebelliousness was growing that I could neither comprehend nor control,” he wrote in a collection of autobiographical sketches, published posthumously as “Polish Memories.” He openly mocked his high-school teachers; at a funeral, uncontrollable laughter seized him by the graveside. “If I learned anything at all in school, it was more likely to be in the breaks, from my schoolmates as they beat me up,” he recalled. “Other than that, I educated myself by reading books, especially those that were forbidden, and by doing nothing—for the freely wandering mind of the loafer is that which best develops the intelligence.” After a desultory attempt at law school—he later claimed that he sent his valet to the lectures as his proxy—he passed the final exam only by chance.
Recurrent bouts of ill health often forced him to the countryside. There, solitary and bored, he began to sketch out a novel. Everyone he showed it to told him it was awful. But he enjoyed the “strange, toxic work” of writing fiction. Gombrowicz puzzled over the symbolism of his dreams, believing that they offered a way to break out of “the whole Polish farce.” His first stories were published in 1933, as the collection “Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity”—later renamed “Bacacay,” after the street he lived on in Buenos Aires. (Gombrowicz’s titles are consistently random: he once explained that he named his books “for the same reason that a person names his dogs—to distinguish them from others.”)
Grotesque, erotic, and often hilarious, the stories immediately established Gombrowicz’s extraordinary voice. A man encounters another man by chance at the opera and shadows him for weeks—sending him flowers, writing letters to his mistress—unaware of the torment his attentions are causing. A visitor to a country estate where the head of the household has just died becomes convinced, for no logical reason, that the man was murdered by a member of his family. A countess famous for her meatless dinners may, it turns out, be serving human flesh. “From the beginning the nonsensical and the absurd were very much to my liking, and I was never more satisfied than when my pen gave birth to some scene that was truly crazy, removed from the (healthy) expectations of mediocre logic, and yet firmly rooted in its own separate logic,” he wrote in “Polish Memories.” As creepy as Poe and as absurdist as Kafka, the stories earned the admiration of Bruno Schulz—an admiration that was not initially reciprocated. But the critics took the title literally, deploring the author’s juvenility. Their disapproval spurred Gombrowicz to greater outrage.
His rebellion was primarily targeted at what he came to call “form.” He gave the word many meanings, but essentially he used it to identify convention in all its guises—rigid manners, standardized attitudes, and, most pernicious, preconceptions about artistic genre or style. “Each second I saw how one of my ‘friends’ tamed a faith for himself, an ideological or aesthetic position, in the hope that in the end he would become a real writer. This approach inevitably ended in a series of grimaces, a pyramid of claptrap, and an orgy of unreality,” he writes in the diary. Instead, he set out to create a new kind of literature—promoting immaturity and imperfection as a cure for inauthenticity—and to lead a life he considered authentic. As he later put it, “I am a humorist, a clown, a tightrope walker, a provocateur, my works stand on their head to please, I am a circus, lyricism, poetry, terror, struggle, fun and games—what more do you want?”
His first major attempt at this, in 1937, was “Ferdydurke,” a fantasia derived from his torturous school years: the students who bullied him, the teachers who babbled clichés, and the never-ending battle against phoniness. It consists of a series of hallucinatory episodes that dissolve into hilarity or violence. The protagonist, Joey Kowalski, has just turned thirty; he is the author of an unappreciated book of short stories (which happens to have the same title as Gombrowicz’s first book). One day, a professor and mad magician named Pimko appears on his doorstep and turns him into a teen-age boy. Wherever Joey goes, from the schoolyard to a country estate, he is surrounded by bizarre, sometimes humorous acts of sadism. Joey is forever being “dealt the pupa”—a kind of shorthand for humiliation, physical or sexual. (Pupa is a Polish slang word for “buttocks,” which Danuta Borchardt, the translator of the current English edition, ingeniously leaves unaltered, giving the translation some of the weirdness of the original.)
The funniest moments in “Ferdydurke” are those in which Gombrowicz satirizes the literary scene, mocking the “cultural aunts” who pass for authorities on literature and the schoolteachers who repeat nonsense like “Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.” When Pimko first arrives at Joey’s apartment, he torments the fledgling author by making him sit while he reads the manuscript he has been working on:
Yet the mockery here implies a paradoxical submission to convention. To constantly struggle against form is to be constantly aware of form; to defend oneself against one’s critics is to admit, despite it all, that they have something to say. In an open letter to Bruno Schulz, published in a Polish literary journal while he was writing “Ferdydurke,” Gombrowicz challenged Schulz—a dozen years older and more established in the literary scene—to respond to an anonymous reader who called Schulz’s writing perverted. Schulz good-naturedly declined to take the bait; he pointed out Gombrowicz’s obsession with codes of value and challenged him to be the “dragonslayer” of convention. It was a challenge Gombrowicz was never able fully to live up to. Even in Argentina, for all his talk of isolation, he could not abandon his lifelong obsession with what everyone else thought of him.
The most famous passage from Gombrowicz’s diary is the one that now stands as its opening:
But this is not what greeted the readers who opened the April, 1953, issue of Kultura. Gombrowicz added it retrospectively, when the segments were collected in book form. Though his project was defined by the search for self, he was not yet ready to thrust himself into it. Later, he grew more adventurous, branching into increasingly personal territory and experimenting more with the form and structure of his entries. But the diary’s initial readers found something more polemical.
In the early years, Gombrowicz fires off one screed after another at the literary establishment. He rails regularly against the niceties of émigré publications (such as the one he is writing in), which he says remind him “of a hospital where the patients are given only soups that are easily digested.” He worries that literature “is in danger of becoming a soft-boiled egg instead of being a hard-boiled one, which is its vocation.” More than anything else, he is infuriated to see Poles comparing their work to Western European art and literature: “Don’t try to become Polish Matisses, you will not spawn a Braque with your deficiencies.” This becomes a favorite theme of the diary: Gombrowicz’s quest to save Polish culture from its own admirers.
Of course, if the émigré press was too kind to writers, the situation in Communist Poland was far worse. Gombrowicz made sure to use his platform to lob grenades at the Communist government. Marxism had been imposed upon the country “just as one drops a cage over a stunned bird,” leaving the intellectual climate shocked and stunted, he wrote in 1956. Communism, in his view, was the ultimate tyranny of “form,” requiring its adherents to submit entirely to the authority of others. In the mid-eighties, when the diary was eventually published in Poland, much of this commentary was excised.
Letters from readers could take months to reach Gombrowicz, but that did not deter him from using his diary to respond to them. Once, Czeslaw Milosz, who served as a kind of spokesman for the Polish literati-in-exile, criticized Gombrowicz for writing as if the Second World War had never happened: “You come along with your revulsion to an immature, provincial Poland from before 1939.” Gombrowicz responded that he was too far removed from contemporary Poland to write about it: “I decided quite a while ago that I would write only about my own reality.” Besides, he was supremely unimpressed by the way Polish writers had responded to the disaster of the war: “Proust found more in his cookie, servant, and counts than they found in years of smoking crematoria.”
Gombrowicz’s unconventional literary judgments are among the funniest moments in the diary. He called Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the much-loved historical epic “Quo Vadis,” a “first-rate second-rate writer.” Rabelais wrote, he said, “the way a child pees against a tree, in order to relieve himself.” (This was intended as a compliment.) Much of Kafka he found simply impossible: “Some day we will know why in our century so many great artists wrote so many unreadable books . . . what sort of warped marriage of artist and recipient spawned these works so deprived of artistic sex appeal.”
Not surprisingly, in criticism he valued the personal approach above all else:
“I ought to treat this diary as an instrument of my becoming before you,” Gombrowicz ventured early on. Indeed, as the years went by, he began to draw away from the polemics and to focus increasingly on his own life. In this sense, the diary—which he called “faithful dog of my soul”—became his major creative endeavor, the work through which he discovered himself.
His exhibitionism begins in mild form, with an almost sheepish account of his daily routine: breakfast each morning at ten o’clock (“tea with ladyfingers, then Quaker Oats”). But soon the diarist moves into the darker corners of his personality. He describes, with exhilaration, writing graffiti in a café bathroom:
Gombrowicz, who had affairs with both men and women, also writes with remarkable honesty about his adventures in the homosexual underworld of Buenos Aires. “It is important for a man speaking publicly—a man of letters—to lead his reader beyond the façade of form, into the boiling cauldron of his private history,” he explained. “Is it ridiculous, even humiliating? Only children or kindhearted aunts . . . can imagine that a writer is a calmly sublime being, a lofty spirit instructing . . . about what is Good and Beautiful from on high.”
Not all of Gombrowicz’s readers appreciated his candor. A subscriber in Canada wrote to complain that “the last ‘diaries’ provoke no reaction in me, beyond the amazement that you write that stuff and that Kultura prints it.” Gombrowicz responds that the letter is “witness to that stifling pressure to which readers always subject the author. Don’t write this, write only that. . . . I am also writing my own story in this diary. That is, not what is important to her or you but to me. I need each of these monologues, each gives me a light impulse. Does my story bore you? That is evidence that you do not know how to read your own from it.”
By the seventh year of his diary, Gombrowicz had fully embraced his new identity. “Today I awakened in the delight of not knowing what a literary award is, that I do not know official honors, the caresses of the public or critics, that I am not one of ‘ours,’ that I entered literature by force—arrogant and sneering. I am the self-made man of literature!” he wrote in 1960. He is grateful that he got out of Poland before he became successful, he says—otherwise, he, too, might have been ruined by the stultifying intellectual scene—and equally grateful that he had the opportunity to write the diary: “What security when it turned out that in a tight spot I could comment on myself—that is exactly what I needed: to become my own critic, my own annotator, judge, director.” The diary had become his engine of creative autonomy: “It was only when I really started to write in the Diary that I felt I was wielding my pen—a wonderful feeling, which I got from neither ‘Ferdydurke’ nor any of my other works of art, which seemed to write themselves . . . somewhere beyond me.”
Yet it was during this period that he returned to fiction, publishing “Pornografia” (1960) and “Cosmos” (1965), his most accomplished novel. “Cosmos,” which Gombrowicz began in 1961, arises from the same existential absurdity that animates “Ferdydurke,” but grounds it in the trappings of daily life. As in all of Gombrowicz’s fiction, there is an autobiographical component: the narrator’s name is Witold, and he has taken refuge from his dissolute life in Warsaw, and from his parents, fleeing to a country inn to relax and write. But he cannot stop noticing things—“signs”—that are unimportant on their own but, taken together, seem to have some sinister significance: a dead sparrow found hanging in the woods, a mark on the ceiling of his room in the shape of an arrow. At the same time, he becomes weirdly fixated on two young women at the inn, until his sexual obsession combines with the strange signs to create an unidentifiable menace. In this novel, Gombrowicz is no longer a circus. His tone is both calmer and more unsettling than the rollicking antics of “Ferdydurke.” Though the fundamental absurdity remains, Gombrowicz’s habitual hilarity is gone, replaced with a quiet dread, beyond rational understanding but nonetheless real:
Naturally, as soon as Gombrowicz had resigned himself to a life of obscurity, his reputation caught up with him. The Polish “thaw”—the brief period of relative freedom that followed a change of government in 1956—resulted in the publication in Poland of all his works except the diary, and “Ferdydurke” soon became a best-seller; French, German, and English translations followed in the next few years. (The book was admired in Europe, but got a cool reception in America; John Ashbery wrote that the novel “refuses to let itself be taken seriously, and it must ultimately face the consequences.”) In 1963, the Ford Foundation invited Gombrowicz to spend a year as a writer-in-residence in Berlin. He left South America for the first time in nearly twenty-four years. “I am writing these words in Berlin,” he recorded in his diary in amazement.
Through his long exile, Gombrowicz had nurtured a fantasy of universal acceptance which he strongly associated with the idea of Europe. But he was disappointed. Visiting Paris and the offices of Kultura for the first time, he discovered that he and his editors had vastly different frames of reference; their Continental sophistication made him feel like a bumpkin. The German writers he encountered—Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Peter Weiss—were friendly but distant. By the time his stay was over, he was seriously ill, and soon developed heart disease in addition to the respiratory ailments he had suffered for years.
Gombrowicz never returned to Argentina, and, having found his mature fictional voice, he all but abandoned his diary. The last few years of entries—occupying less than thirty pages of the new edition—were written in quick bursts, as he shuttled between Paris, Italy, and the French Riviera. Meanwhile, his plays were being performed all over Europe; “Cosmos” appeared to great acclaim. In 1968, he was short-listed for the Nobel Prize, and the story goes that Yasunari Kawabata beat him by one vote. The following summer, he died, at the age of sixty-four.
In the final diary entry, written shortly before his death, he was still railing against the provincialism of literary Poland. “My entire life I have fought not to be a ‘Polish writer’ but myself, Gombrowicz,” he wrote. He nearly succeeded. ♦
