by Marek Hlasko
ALL BACKS WERE TURNED
www.newvesselpress.com
First published in Polish in 1964 as Wszyscy byli odwróceni
Copyright © 2014 Andrzej Czyzewski
Translation Copyright © 2014 Julita Wroniak-Mirkowicz
Introduction Copyright © 2014 George Z. Gasyna
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hlasko, Marek
[Wszysci byli odwróceni. English]
All Backs Were Turned / Marek Hlasko; translation by Tomasz Mirkowicz.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-939931-12-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936440
I. Poland —Fiction.
REBEL LIT SERIES
Rebel Lit is a new series by New Vessel Press showcasing works of literature that display a spirit of rebellion, challenge, heroism and courage.
The first in this series is All Backs Were Turned, by Marek Hlasko. The novel is a bleak and brutal look at the lives of a woebegone group of outcasts in pre-1967 Israel, by the Polish author known as the James Dean of Eastern Europe. Hlasko, with his startling good looks and his hardboiled, existential prose, was an uncompromising artist who pointed out the hypocrisy and cruelties of society no matter the cost. Exiled from his native Poland, he drifted from country to country, using his pen to dismantle false veneers of civility and show the horror behind the masks he encountered. Hlasko wrote about a post-World War Two existence irreparably scarred by fascism and the Holocaust. Roman Polanski called Hlasko “a born rebel and troublemaker of immense charm.” The New York Times wrote that he was a “spokesman for those who were angry and beat … turbulent, temperamental, and tortured.” We are proud to present All Backs Were Turned as the inaugural title in the Rebel Lit Series from New Vessel Press.
INTRODUCTION
THE INSCRIPTION ON THE GRAVE AT WARSAW’S OLD Powazki Cemetery reads, “His life was short, and all backs were turned.” Indeed, Marek Hlasko passed away at an age at which many novelists are just coming into their own, entering what biographers like to refer to as the major phase. Hlasko was just 35—though years of eking out a marginal existence, frequently underemployed or resorting to what Poles of that generation called “black work,” and a penchant for running afoul of the law, all conspired to make him look like he was in his fifties.
By most accounts (of those who knew and cared for him, at least), the final two or three years of Hlasko’s life were a period of intense burnout, the tail end of a spectacular career that had launched him, at mere twenty, as the foremost voice of his generation—a deeply troubled generation, traumatized by the horrors of Nazi occupation, the Holocaust, and the violent Soviet-backed communist takeover of Poland that followed—and simultaneously its chief iconoclast. His earliest writings, set pieces of socialist realist psychodrama published in communist Poland while he was still a teen, are in the main forgettable, though even there, his fascination with the darker aspects of daily life, with betrayal, solitude, rage, and failure that would become his trademark is palpable; the unrelentingly grim, claustrophobic mood is only fleetingly punctured by requisite socialist platitudes, while the fiascos of the protagonists are final and irrevocable.
By other accounts, however, Hlasko in 1969, the year of his death, was about to enter a new stage in life. Having led a peripatetic existence throughout the previous decade, shuffling between various safe havens in Western Europe, Israel, and the United States—his native Poland declared Hlasko persona non grata in 1958, following the illicit publication of one of his novels by an émigré press, while he himself was in France on a state-funded fellowship—Hlasko was seriously considering settling down somewhere on the American West Coast, ideally the LA basin. When asked why there, of all places in the world, and in light of his halting English and a relative lack of contacts in the area, Polish or otherwise, his response was simple: “LA has good weather. I like good weather.”
Was his sudden death on June 14 while staying at the home of his West German publisher, of an overdose of sleeping pills, a deliberate act, as the popular press insisted, the last spasm of stubborn contrariness on the part of socialist Poland’s original bad boy, variously hailed as an Iron Curtain counterpoint to James Dean and as a communist Angry Young Man? Was it a consequence of ongoing disappointment and heartbreak? Or a merely banal though tragic miscalculation, exacerbated by immoderate alcohol use? We will probably never know with certainty. And perhaps it does not matter. Fellow author and adventurer Jerzy Kosinski, another of communist Poland’s very bad boys and a fellow exile ultimately to the US—though his eventual suicide, in 1991, was by all accounts planned—possibly settled the matter when he declared that Hlasko “personally lived through what he wrote and died of an overdose of solitude and not enough love.”
Hlasko began writing fiction while still in high school, and was publicly recognized early and often. He had movie star good looks, a roguish smile, and an ideologically “correct” past, having refashioned himself as an orphaned child of simple laborers, a housemaid and a fireman, when his father had in fact been a prominent attorney in interwar Poland. Hlasko said the right thing frequently enough when called upon and talked his way into the front offices of the premier state-run youth-oriented literary magazine, Po prostu [“The Way It Is”]. Surrounded by adoring acolytes of both sexes, guided by benefactors always on the lookout for the next hot new thing to use in the propaganda wars with the West, and even “managed” for a time by the then-chairman of the Polish Writers’ Union, Hlasko was being groomed for his tenure as a shining star of Poland’s new socialist culture. He was to be the poet of the transport truck and the proletarian suburb, a writer of youth and possibility—within Party-approved boundaries, of course. This was a role he initially assumed with enthusiasm, and it paid big dividends for a time, in the shape of fellowships, interviews, cash awards, vacations at writers’ colonies on the state’s dime, and the like.
In short, Hlasko’s rise was meteoric; he became a legend in his own time, a paradoxical socialist brand. Yet on the elemental level of the myth, quite apart from the counterfeit past, a number of factors conspired from the outset to disrupt and undercut the facile image of the communist rogue with a heart of gold and a volume of Marx’s Capital under his arm. For one thing, critics in Poland and elsewhere on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain generally referred to his texts as “behaviorism,” a tendentious genre which encompasses thousands of volumes of novels and plays that appeared in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Stalinist era, and routinely featured “difficult” characters whose consciousness needed to be raised or modified. Few took proper heed of the black undercurrents of the work, or were willing to admit that Hlasko’s true lineage was actually a fusion of the American noir thriller and Western European cinematic realism. Indeed, socialist realism merely provided a framework to be broken at the earliest convenience. Hlasko, then, was hardly the slightly disparaging painter of everyday life of Marxist utopias-in-progress, as many critics maintained (at least in their public discourse). Rather, in a true Conradian idiom he sought to “make you see,” to partake in his own vision. And as the years passed, this vision diverged further and further away from the constraining dogmas of approved, formulaic “production novels”—novels that focused, literally, on “production” in farms and factories—towards dramas of power, lust, and revenge, dramas enacted between and among fal
len men—men who are in turn elevated to the status of archetypes, symbols even.
In fact, the socialist heroes of even his early stories and novels, such as The Eighth Day of the Week, are no wise triumphant New Men with a flaw or two. Instead, they are broken subjects, unsteadily seeking their way within an inhuman system, sometimes improvising, frequently resorting to manipulations and lies as they seek to improve on impossible odds, their efforts more often than not rewarded with catastrophe. Already in 1956, at the peak of his Polish fame, Hlasko stated that his narratives, chock-full of brutality and heartbreak though they were, simply reflected reality as he knew it, that his protagonists were looking in vain for love and fulfillment in a city that never smiles. (Post-war, derelict Warsaw was the setting here, though any number of Polish cities and towns would have fit that bill.) Indeed it was socialist realism, that bastard genre of happy tomorrows pledged but never delivered on—since infiltrators, saboteurs, and eternal enemies lurked always and everywhere and had to be eliminated first—which presented the cynic’s vision of life. The protagonist of The Eighth Day of the Week, an underemployed writer named Grzegorz, wrestles with the contradiction between what has been promised him of the brave new world and what has been borne out. In the end, he asks, “Can anything valuable come out of a world that has to use blackmail to keep from collapsing?” The indirect answer to his question, which he himself provides, is, “Waiter, half a liter, please.”
From 1959 until his death, Hlasko led a life of exile: his petitions to return home to Poland were ignored or rejected by the regime in Warsaw, and so he roamed around Western Europe and Israel. Soon, what had begun as youthful wanderings began to resemble an existential imperative. By consensus, Hlasko’s most intensely productive phase is the period between 1959-64, though even then, as an avowed “outsider,” he shuffled between West Germany and Israel, sometimes for reasons practical—he was married to a popular German screen actress for a time, and had many acquaintances in Israel—but frequently due to factors having to do with the impossibility of finding true peace or a true home.
The texts either dating from or inspired by this chapter in his life, such as the short novel Killing the Second Dog (Drugie zabicie psa, available in English also from New Vessel Press), are unusually sparse, claustrophobic, oversaturated by color and light, and punctuated by images of surprising beauty which serve as a vivid counterpoint to the stark portrayals of brutality and humiliation endured by the down-and-out antiheroes. Combined with scathing irony, poignant vignettes of frailty, and an occasional wink to the reader, this semi-autobiographic world is a zone dominated by men, men who are often paired in their peregrinations so as to both complement and expose one another’s weak sides. In fact, all the protagonists of Hlasko’s oeuvre suffer from major handicaps; typically these are latent until foregrounded by inevitable conflict or are laid bare in dramatic outbursts of rare, abject honesty by the other, the companion, or by a woman who sometimes completes the triangle of interdependencies. This is a realm in which conflict is contested chiefly between men and, in an unhappily misogynistic turn, a realm in which the men are very frequently undone by (their inability to relate to) women. At the opening of the novel, co-protagonist Dov Ben Dov, a former Israeli Army officer who has fallen on hard times, is on trial yet again, this time for assault in a Tel Aviv club. When the presiding judge asks him for his name and demands that he answer whether he will plead guilty to the charges of “disrupting public order in the city of Tel Aviv on June fifth,” Dov fires right back: “No. As far as I remember, there’s never been any order in this city.” Conflict is in the very bones of Hlasko’s protagonists, and of his plots, and there are never any easy answers.
Expansive and self-congratulatory male bravado fills the entire canvas, but it becomes clear soon enough that the root cause of Dov’s misfortunes, present and future—apart from his cantankerous, narcissistic father perhaps—is his spectacularly failed marriage. All the other men in the novel, whether friends, enemies, or mere bystanders, concur on this point. “She brought him down” is the laconic assessment of one of the peripheral men in the story, as he sits in a restaurant where he’s just met with Dov. “She did,” a passing waiter nods in fatalistic agreement.
As noted above, Hlasko’s novels and shorter fiction, especially those produced in the late ’50s and early ’60s, including the work you have in your hands, are organized around two male protagonists who share the spotlight. However, readers have unequal access to their minds: one of them is typically given more attention, his internal world relatively more open to inspection, his motives less inaccessible. This figure is frequently construed in Hlasko criticism as a foil of the author himself, though any such overidentifications are risky. We often encounter the two principals while they are already on the road, in the midst of a longed-for escape from their problems, which sometimes involves their participating in some elaborate swindle or dealing with similar reversals of fortune fate has thrown their way. These two men are fellow travelers, and to some extent share a destiny, but Hlasko also posits them as rivals. Yet, while they despise significant elements of each other’s personalities, they desperately need one another – much the same way as Beckett’s characters in Endgame or Waiting for Godot depend on one another’s presence even as they abhor it. This picaresque convention, the idea of setting out on the road with a companion, constitutes a time-honored literary paradigm in the Western canon. Hlasko borrows liberally from this convention, but further sharpens his encounters “between men” through the cinematic twist of extreme close-ups, abrupt perspectival changes, and the deployment of recurrent objects that may foreshadow dramatic action. In All Backs Were Turned, for instance, stones play such a symbolic function, evoking—among other images—Christ’s parable on the doubtful virtue of guiltlessness and, more obliquely, the Genesis account of the contest between Cain and Abel. However, such scenarios of the friend/rival and the road do not appear in Hlasko’s fiction merely for structural convenience or pedagogical payout; rather, they recur precisely because the protagonists keep stumbling into familiar situations, yet never seem to have learned anything from last time.
They engage in pithy sarcasm and constant one-upmanship—but the situation can also turn on a dime. The stakes are deadly serious, the categories of survival starkly elemental, leaving precious little room for maneuver. And justice, here on the frontier, ends up as a cruel handmaid of forces that our protagonists, preoccupied with scraping a living, with capturing happiness if only for a fleeting moment—and thus human, all too human, tragically human—are simply unable to grasp. Wrapped up in their fragile egos, preoccupied with their dramas, their backs turned, they never see that stone coming.
George Z. Gasyna
Associate Professor of Slavic Languages
and Literatures, University of Illinois
WEARING A BLACK HAT AND A BLACK COAT, HIS mournful face surrounded by a shaggy beard, he resembled a bird from some fantastic story; one of those fairy tales you tell children so they’ll fall asleep, tales that belong to the horrors of childhood. He was sitting behind a table set up on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse; a typewriter stood before him. The man’s clients were too poor to afford a real lawyer, yet he was no worse than any lawyer in this city. He knew how to write all sorts of complaints, petitions, and appeals, no matter whether the case had to do with alimony or a car accident, and he knew beforehand what the verdict would be. He could also supply witnesses of all kinds, ranging from innocent-eyed youths who just happened to be walking down the street when the accident occurred and saw everything that took place—or rather what, two months or even a year later, he told them they’d seen—to distinguished old men nobody would dare accuse of lying.
He adjusted his hat; rivulets of sweat were trickling down his neck, and the client fidgeted nervously. A clean sheet of paper had been inserted into the typewriter fifteen minutes ago, but so far the bird hadn’t written a word.
“Does my case look ba
d?” the client asked.
“No,” the blackbird said. “Everything is going to be fine.”
“I thought so,” the client said. “I want that man punished. I want him to go to jail.”
“There’ll be two trials,” the bird said. “And he’ll go to jail twice.”
“Good, good,” the client said.
“Not as good as you think.”
“Why?’
“If you press charges against him, they’ll lock him up. Then, as soon as he’s released, they’ll have to lock him up again. For assault and battery. You’ll be the victim.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” the client said.
The bird didn’t answer; he was watching a police van that had stopped in front of the courthouse. A young cop got out of the cab and opened the back door. Two men jumped out. They were handcuffed together.
“Take these off,” one of them said to the cop.
“You have to enter the courtroom handcuffed,” the cop said. “Rules are rules.”
“We still have ten minutes,” the man said. “You can handcuff us again later.” Suddenly he turned around and saw the bird and his client; he started walking toward them, pulling the other man with him. The bird remained motionless when they loomed over his table. He watched the bigger man’s bronzed, muscular hand shoot out in his direction and tear the empty sheet of paper out of his typewriter. The big man crumpled the sheet into a ball and tossed it away. Then he and the other prisoner entered the building; the cop followed, fanning his sweaty face with his cap.
“You were right,” the client said to the blackbird. “I won’t press charges. I’ll save myself the trouble. There should be no quarrel between Jews.”
“My feelings exactly,” the bird said.
The client wanted to turn away, but the blackbird grabbed his coattail. “Hey, my money!”