WITH ITS LOVE OF fashioning opposites, nature seems to have set down Keats’s a century later in a provincial Polish town, in the shy, dark shape of Bruno Schulz. To Keats, melancholy was merely what comes from recognizing the finite, temporary nature of things fabulous (“Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine”). To Schulz, melancholy is an omnipotent scourge, not pleasure’s price but its absolute denier. If Keats’s imagination was sponsored by the world, Schulz’s only darts through life’s alleys and cracks, forever expecting to be snuffed. And yet, the letters of this discouraged, menaced artist have a poignant Chaplinesque charm. We never tire of Schulz amid his troubles.
Stuck teaching drawing in a local gymnasium, the already middle-aged writer finds himself unable in the mid-1930s to capitalize on his recent literary debut, the critically praised prose fantasies— a sort of Polish magical realism—of his book Cinnamon Shops. “I don’t know if I can stand this drudgery much longer,” he writes to one editor. In truth, it’s worse than that; Schulz’s inability to control his students is both comic and nightmarish:
the violent and desperate measures of intimidation I must resort to in order to keep them in check fill me with disgust. Every day I leave that scene brutalized and soiled inside, filled with distaste for myself and so violently drained of energy that several hours are not enough to restore it.
The schoolmaster-artist hopes for a grant that will give him a respite. He’s blissful when he’s awarded one; crushed when the stipend runs out. Additionally burdened with family problems (a neurotic sister) and poor health (kidney stones), Schulz also despairs of his on-again, off-again engagement to a troubled and usually absent fiancée, Józefina Szelińska. Still, whatever their difficulties, she “represents my participation in life,” he tells one correspondent; “only by her mediation am I a human being and not just a lemur or gnome.” And yet, it’s in these delighful, miniature incarnations that Schulz, wearing his mournful cap and bells, seems to look up and resize the world for our imaginations.
“I am a reactive creature,” he writes to Romana Halpern, one of several artistic women who offer appreciation and aid. His self-diagnosis may shift all the time, but he pinpoints one afflicting constant when he tells “Roma,” in August 1937: “What I lack is not so much faith in my own gifts but something more pervasive: trust in life, confident acquiescence in a personal destiny, faith in the ultimate benevolence of existence.” Through all his premonitions of doom (“I’ve left springtime behind for good,” he declares in 1934), he goes on writing and sketching, marvelously, knowing that his depression—which, among other symptoms, keeps him from answering letters—has ironic roots in a preoccupation with contentment, one that makes him spend “every other minute testing the balance of satisfaction in exploring the art of happiness. Every other minute I ask myself the question: Do I have the right to be satisfied, is the undertaking ‘Schulz’ worth carrying on, does it justify further investment?”
In fact, he steadily tries to grow that frail, fabulous enterprise. We find Schulz looking up from letter after letter with those bright lemur-like eyes, making himself ingratiating, clever, winsome—doing what needs to be done to keep his writing career alive: proposing translations of his own work; securing letters of introduction; complaining about the favoritism and fixes involved in literary prize-giving; even soliciting blurbs for the incomprehensible verse of a rich man whose favor he needs. Schulz eventually becomes embarrassed over the abundance of good turns done him by Romana Halpern, and on February 21, 1938, must tell her: “How sweet of you to remember my affairs even while you are in the hospital, to escape from medical care to run an errand I hadn’t even asked you to do.”
But he keeps her on the job, and it is to Roma that Schulz admits suffering from “the misconception that literary creation can begin only when all difficulties have been cleared away over the entire range of one’s life.” His own writing life disproves this idea utterly, but he still can’t let go of it, or allow Roma the opposite misconception, “that suffering is necessary for creative work. This is a worn old cliché.” Schulz tells her she’s making a mistake to “overrate” him; her “emotional binge” of artist-worship may provide him flattery that he finds “very pleasant,” but he fears “the ‘morning after.’”
And yet Schulz himself, in letter after letter, exalts the creative life over the one he’s forced to lead each day in Drohobycz: “One must … fence off one’s inner life, not permit the vermin of ordinary cares to infest it.” As with Keats, the goal of his writing seems ultimately less aesthetic than spiritual: “I long for some outside affirmation of the inner world whose existence I postulate. To cling to it by sheer faith alone, to lug it along with me in spite of everything, is a toil and torment of Atlas.”
Whether writing to Roma or, as in the sentences just above, to the novelist Tadeusz Breza, Schulz betrays no embarrassment over his abject wants. He believes in something like the opposite of ripeness, positing “immaturity” as the life force, and art as a kind of “regression” into genius. “My ideal goal is to ‘mature’ into childhood. That would be genuine maturity for you.” A reader realizes, from such declarations, that the weird near-gaiety to be sensed in Schulz’s letters is not conscious whistling in the dark of circumstance but the laughter of a childhood self that remains alive behind a single, but thickening, wall.
In 1936, during an exchange of open letters with Schulz, the writer Witold Gombrowicz conjures up the figure of a doctor’s wife who, he says, has pronounced Schulz “either a sick pervert or a poseur.” Like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Brown or J. D. Salinger’s Fat Lady, this bourgeois matron becomes the avatar of a mighty challenge. Gombrowicz dares Schulz to abandon his more rarefied imaginings and “Get back down here on earth!” to grapple with this real and unpleasant woman.
But Schulz won’t take the fleshy bait: “Oh no, dear Witold, I have liberated myself from this sort of thing.” He is bent on transcending sexuality (however hard he finds it “to resist the charm of [the woman’s] legs”), as well as everything “cynical and amoral, irrational and mocking.” With this doctor’s wife, he adds, Gombrowicz may be pretending to “defend vitality and biology, against abstraction, against our detachment from life,” but as a fellow artist, whether he knows it or not, Gombrowicz is really, like Schulz, chasing something newer and better: “The avant-garde of biology is thought, experiment, creative discovery. We, in fact, are this belligerent biology, this conquering biology; we are the truly vital.”
Schulz’s reply, published in the journal Studio, was probably no more self-consciously composed than many of his private letters, which he was known to put through outlines and drafts. Indeed, Cinnamon Shops, his masterpiece, grew directly out of his well-wrought letters to Debora Vogel, a writer friend and philosopher. As Jerzy Ficowski, Schulz’s posthumous editor, explains: “piece by piece, the brilliant stories which would become the stuff of Schulz’s first book [were] couched in extensive postscripts which gradually took over the whole substance of the letters.” Publication saved both the Cinnamon Shops stories and the exchange with Gombrowicz; most of the rest of Schulz’s large correspondence was destroyed during the Holocaust. He himself was killed—shot in the head by an SS officer—in 1942.
Four years earlier, he had composed for Romana Halpern one of the most vivid assessments ever made of the imaginative challenge posed by letter writing:
Spatial remoteness causes the written word to seem too weak, ineffective, powerless to hit its target. And the target itself, the person who gets our words at the end of that road through space, seems only half-real, of uncertain existence, like a character in a novel…. One probably shouldn’t say such things but fight instead that weakness of imagination which refuses to believe in the reality of remote objects.
Any reader who finishes Schulz’s surviving correspondence—a slender single volume—ends up applying this kind of imaginative effort to the rest of it, all the letters that were set ablaze,
somewhere beyond the pale.
WITHIN A FEW YEARS of Schulz’s murder, Poland had found a new, different gruesomeness in Communist subjugation. The poet and diplomat Czeslaw Milosz took flight from it in 1951, two years before publishing The Captive Mind, a book that would find an enthusiastic reader in the American Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton. In 1958, Merton began a ten-year-long correspondence with the Polish exile by sending him a sort of spiritual fan letter: “It is an important book,” he wrote of The Captive Mind, “which makes most other books on the present state of man look abjectly foolish.”
The letters that Merton continues sending to the self-exiled Milosz, first in France and later in California, often make it hard for a reader to remember that their writer is in his forties and early fifties and has already been settled for two decades at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Merton may be established as a literary figure (he offers Milosz help securing an agent), but it is Milosz who sets the moral and intellectual pace of their exchange, into which the monk seems gratefully to relax, a needy and agreeable postulant.
Merton admits to naïveté about Communism and sees what some members of a later generation would sarcastically call “moral equivalence” between the Cold War’s superpowers. Looking for “a third position,” he predicts to Milosz that “One day we are going to wake up and find America and Russia in bed together (forgive the unmonastic image) and realize that they were happily married all along.” Milosz has to warn the priest about “placing both camps on the same level,” let alone in a connubial embrace. Milosz himself is squeezed inside the bipolar world: “For The Captive Mind I have been denounced to the police: ‘not enough’ anti-communist and probably an agent; while [giving off a] hideous smell in Paris literary circles: a bourgeois, he writes against what is sacrosanct.” Even so, he can remind Merton that “of the two [camps] not the West is pushing and probing for new ways of expansion.” He can also warn him against peace movements that create only an “exasperation which pushes many people to the right.”
A chastened Merton tends, almost always, to concede the point, though if he thinks, even for a moment, that he hears Milosz moving into an early sixties groove, he fairly clamors his encouragement. When the Polish poet worries briefly over the complacency that leaves America “grazing like a cow,” Merton cooks up an over-the-top metaphor of America as “this continual milkshake”—or, better yet—this “Calypso’s Island where no one is ever tempted to think and where one just eats and exists and supports the supermarket and the drug store and General Motors and the TV.” It’s easy for a reader to see Milosz, only four years older than his correspondent, as a sort of elderly bishop, offering the overeager novice a sympathetic but cautionary pat on the head.
And yet, their minds do meet, often provocatively, on the treacherous ground of politics and religion. When Milosz explains the unexpected spiritual benefit of Poland’s experience with Communism, which “made [the] inner life of human beings more intense” there, it’s a paradox that can be appreciated by Merton, who recognizes sinners as “the ones who attract to themselves the infinite compassion of God.” Milosz confides that the writings of Simone Weil helped him through the worst of the despair that produced The Captive Mind, and admits to a belief in the Resurrection, if not the soul’s immortality. He settles for calling himself “crypto-religious,” the pull of the Church being still strong enough that he has trouble finding the right sign-off for his letters to Merton: “there is this respect for the priest’s robe,” he explains, so “let me say with brotherly love …”
The two men’s connection is made easier by Merton’s own feeling that he is, even within the walls of the Church, a “complete lone wolf” as a Catholic. “I have not coped with the basic theological questions,” he writes in 1961. “It only looks that way.” The censors of his order give him trouble, and his religious searching will eventually send him, at the end of his abbreviated life (he died at fifty-three), toward Buddhism and the Far East.
But Milosz is the more reluctant customer when it comes to any sort of ontological comfort. He explains his own ill-suitedness to Merton’s Trappist silence and solitude by saying: “I cannot afford too great interiorisation and have to keep myself on the level defined by The Cloud of Unknowing as contemplation of one’s own wretchedness.” He complains, too, that Merton does “not pay much attention to torture and suffering in Nature”—provoking a rare rebuttal from the monk: “Nature and I are very good friends,” Merton writes, “and console one another for the stupidity and the infamy of the human race and its civilization … Spiders have always eaten flies and I can shut it out of my consciousness without guilt.”
In fact, Milosz agrees with Merton about the ultimate separate-ness of nature and mankind but draws a very different—and finally more optimistic—conclusion from the split. He may “have always felt the burden of blind and cruel necessity, of mechanism, in Nature, in my body, in my psychology,” and yet, “History, as a purely human domain, alien to Nature, meant liberation.” What to Merton seems a friend is, to Milosz, a chrysalis—one that humans can transcend together, if not individually.
The Merton/Milosz letters are the kind of considered exchange to which e-mail is now doing such chatty, hurry-up violence. In the manner of Hopkins and Bridges, the men write each other for more than two years before using first names in their salutations. Both have a sense that the correspondence is sufficiently important to be conducted only at thoughtful intervals. Because each takes pains, in Milosz’s phrase, to “avoid bavardage,” their published letters (Striving Towards Being) take up fewer than two hundred pages. When Merton apologizes for “rambling,” he’s actually done nothing of the kind; the apology is just a tic of epistolary politeness, as old as Pliny the Younger, and forever peculiar, since people almost never apologize for the real rambling that they do in conversation.
A couple of years into the correspondence, each writer admits to the other that he would enjoy meeting face to face. That ends up happening just twice, once at the abbey and once in Berkeley, and it is one measure of the letters’ richness that their production falls away to nearly nothing, as if by some literal disenchantment, after the word turns flesh. The sacred or at least rarefied nature of their correspondence becomes ever so slightly profane. Whereas in 1959, Milosz would pose the question “perhaps Prometheus was not an ancestor of modern revolutionaries, perhaps he was in revolt against a heavy, false God, but not against God the Father?”—Merton will eventually just ask, “What is new with you?”
History was slowly carrying Milosz, and Poland, to something better. But during 1968, what would be the last year of Merton’s life, the monk seems increasingly sad, caught, a bit like Milosz in the early fifties, in a spiritual-political vise, in his case between “puerile optimism about the ‘secular city’” and the displeasure of conservative local Catholics “burning my books because I am opposed to the Viet Nam war.” Though by now a theological celebrity, one whose published writings, including volumes of letters, are ready to be consumed as good-news epistles by thousands of readers, Merton still feels the need for private, epistolary devotion to Milosz’s obvious moral authority. He last writes him on November 21, 1968, from Darjeeling, amidst India’s “monasteries, temples, lamas, paintings, jungles.” He is weeks away from the accident that will kill him, unaware, as Paul wrote the Romans, that “The night is far spent, the day is at hand …”
CHAPTER SEVEN Confession
Sam’s a thirsty lad and he won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood.
David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam,” letter to
columnist Jimmy Breslin, 1977
IN A LETTER WRITTEN to her new spiritual advisor, Father John Hamilton Cowper Johnson, near the beginning of Lent in 1951, Rose Macaulay, the English novelist, worried about “the time I must cost you, and the trouble, and the stamps.” By then nearing seventy, the author of They Were Defeated (1932) was still trying to recover from two blows she had been dealt a decad
e before: the death of her married lover, Gerald O’Donovan, and the destruction, during the Blitz, of all the possessions in her London flat: “I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with,” she had written a younger friend in May 1941.
The particular loss of O’Donovan’s letters stimulated Macaulay, not long after the bombing, to write a short story in which the only remaining token of the heroine’s lover is a “charred corner of paper,” less than one page of a single, quarrelsome letter quite uncharacteristic of the couple’s long and peaceful, if illicit, devotion: “all that was legible of it was a line and a half of close small writing, the o’s and the a’s open at the top. It had been written twenty-one years ago, and it said, ‘leave it at that. I know now that you don’t care twopence; if you did you would’ … The words, each time she looked at them, seemed to darken and obliterate a little more of the twenty years that had followed them …”
Gerald O’Donovan was an ex-priest and novelist whom Macaulay had met in London during the First World War, when both were employed by the government’s Department of Propaganda. Having once broken his clerical vows, O’Donovan seemed determined to hold on to his marital ones, and Macaulay never pressed the point. Without the survival of their letters, it is difficult to know the exact nature of their relationship throughout the 1920s and 1930s, though biographers have tried to draw inferences from whatever other evidence—including her novels—the decidedly private Macaulay left behind. In her 1991 life of the writer, Jane Emery proceeded cautiously, but did feel able to conclude that the secret affair with O’Donovan resulted in “the continued suppression of emotion in [Macaulay’s] work.”
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