Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  The Emperor is a parable of rule which offers a number of lessons. Foremost looms the inevitable tendency of a despot, be he king, ward boss, or dictator, to prefer loyalty to ability in his subordinates, and to seek safety in stagnation. One of Haile Selassie’s problems, well managed as long as power was kept within court circles, was to balance the forces within his government so that no one branch or clique developed any initiative or momentum of its own. The price paid, of course, was a corruption and an inertia that broke the bonds between the monarchy and the nation. Another lesson, more elusive in its workings, is the fragile, even phantasmal nature of the connection between the ruler and the ruled. Haile Selassie was so accustomed to ruling, with its ceaseless pomp and protocol, that he displayed a sublime passivity—infuriating to some of his retainers—when the Palace began to sink. He allowed himself to be used by the military as its figurehead and through his non-resisting person permitted a transition to revolution. How much of this was intentional it would take another book to tell us. The courtier “C.” explained to Mr. Kapuściński, “His Venerable Majesty wanted to rule over everything. Even if there was a rebellion, he wanted to rule over the rebellion, to command a mutiny, even if it was directed against his own reign.” Perhaps, in his mind, as he conferred each day that summer with delegations from the Dergue and—himself always dressed in military uniform now—visited his terrified ministers as they awaited incarceration, he was still ruling. These procedures might have seemed no less real than those of the days when his Ministers of the Pen and the Purse would translate his murmurings into governmental action. “It’s so very difficult,” mused “M. W. Y.,” “to establish where the borderline is between living power, great, even terrifying, and the appearance of power, the empty pantomime of ruling, being one’s own dummy, only playing the role, not seeing the world, not hearing it, merely looking into oneself.” For power, appearances to the contrary, flows upward from the governed: all the munificence of Haile Selassie’s court derived from the exertions of desperately poor peasants. And in fact power can be eventually withheld. Ethiopia in 1960 was not ready for revolution; by 1974, it was.

  Not that peasants, as such, revolted. The eloquent and philosophical A. A. observes:

  Up north there was no rebellion. No one raised his voice or his hand up there.… The usefulness of going hungry is that a hungry man thinks only of bread. He’s all wrapped up in the thought of food.… Who destroyed our Empire? Who reduced it to ruin? Neither those who had too much, nor those who had nothing, but those who had a bit. Yes, one should always beware of those who have a bit, because they are the worst, they are the greediest, it is they who push upward.

  It is no paradox that the customary fomenters of modern revolution are young members of the middle class rather than of the oppressed masses. It is these who have had opportunity to think of more than bread, yet have not attained an entrenched position in the established order. Haile Selassie distributed scholarships and selectively encouraged education and thus helped create the class that brought him down. Both the leader of the failed coup of 1960, Germame Neway, and of the successful one of 1974, Mengistu Haile-Mariam, had spent time, at the imperial government’s expense, in the United States, which continues to export, in the form of raised consciousness, more revolution than the Soviet Union.

  Ethiopia is distinguished from most Third World countries by its ancient history of independence, on its craggy African plateau. It is typically Third World, however, in that its government is the nation’s one significant accumulation of capital and therefore must serve as the main avenue to wealth. Mr. Kapuściński calls it “a poor country, in which the only source of property is not hard work and productivity but extraordinary privilege.” The United States and the other industrial nations of the West are fortunate insofar as high political office is financially unattractive, except as a stepping stone to best-selling memoirs. When the most energetically entrepreneurial types are drawn elsewhere in the economy, a possibility of altruistic service enters officialdom. But until a society can generate superior economic opportunity elsewhere, government is apt to be a league of exploiters, a protection racket dearly selling the governed a modicum of peace. The jacket flap of The Emperor claims that when it was published in Poland, in 1978, “it was widely viewed as an allegory of dictatorship in general. Critics saw its publication as a key event in shaping the consensus for reform in Poland.” Perhaps; but the Cold War moral that stands out is the orthodox Communist call to revolution against autocratic and elitist regimes. The intolerable extent of callously regarded misery allowed to flourish under Haile Selassie is firmly, though gracefully, indicated, in this book devoted to the melodious ghosts of his regime. The vivid charm of these voices—the courtesy, the irony, the rhetorical flair, a certain antique quality of dispassionate speculation amid timeless horizons—transports us to an atmosphere perfumed with the lingering scents of the Queen of Sheba. The Emperor himself, though he is the titular subject, remains less than vivid—something of a mystery to his court as he was to the world, a grave and soft-spoken king seen through the wrong end of the telescope, a man who became invisible when he went to bed. Yet his world, the abruptly abolished world of the Amharic aristocracy, lives in these pages, so curiously delicate, of remembrance collected amid danger and ruin.

  Schulz’s Charred Scraps

  LETTERS AND DRAWINGS OF BRUNO SCHULZ, with Selected Prose, edited by Jerzy Ficowski, translated from the Polish by Walter Arndt with Victoria Nelson. 249 pp. Harper & Row, 1988.

  This is a book of remnants—a scrapbook of those drawings, letters, and uncollected prose pieces that Jerzy Ficowski, no less devoted a posthumous executor for Bruno Schulz than Max Brod was for Franz Kafka, has been able to find in the forty years since World War II’s horrendous work of destruction and scattering ceased. Schulz was born in 1892 in the Galician province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a territory that after 1923 became part of independent Poland; he was murdered by a Gestapo agent in 1942 during a minor—for those black days—massacre in the Jewish ghetto of Drohobycz. Here in this town (now Drogobych in the Soviet Ukraine) Schulz had spent all fifty years of his life, supporting himself as a teacher of drawing and crafts in the secondary school. His training had been in architecture, and his first artistic exertions had been in graphic art. He published, in his fifth decade, two small but amazing books, whose awkward American titles are Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1934) and The Street of Crocodiles (1937). In the few years before frail health, chronic depression, and the advent of the Holocaust silenced him, he enjoyed a modest literary celebrity and communication with the brightest spirits of the Polish artistic world. After the war, Schulz’s works have found—what he vainly sought during his lifetime—translation out of Polish into the major languages of Europe. The fevered brilliance of his descriptive prose and the bold mythologization he imposed on his childhood impressions have generated, if not quite the universal impact of Kafka’s or García Márquez’s fantasy, an exalted reputation among other writers. I. B. Singer has called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived,” Cynthia Ozick has paid Schulz the homage of devoting a novel (The Messiah of Stockholm) to the supposed discovery of the Polish writer’s lost work The Messiah, and the Yugoslav Danilo Kiš has said simply, “Schulz is my god.”

  Schulz was, as his critical essays and comments make manifest, a bold and profound literary theorist, whose program has a postmodern ring to it. He approached literary works, including his own, as above all texts, collections of words encoded with “polysemantic, unfathomable” significance. His most extended and rapturous review praises a novel few non-Poles will have read, The Foreigner, by Maria Kuncewicz; in Schulz’s interpretation, the adventures of the heroine, Róza, all work to deepen for her the meaning of a nonsensical German verse—“Diese, diese, o ja, wunderschöne Nase” (“This, this, oh yes, absolutely lovely nose”)—encountered in her girlhood, during her first romantic involvement. “This was the text of Róz
a’s fate, the couplet she would recite endlessly, each time with a different intonation, each time closer to understanding.” Until this understanding is reached, she will be terrified by death, “which is devoid of meaning when it does not seal a destiny fulfilled.” She cannot “be redeemed except by the words uttered that single time, the couplet that was her curse.” The couplet somehow returns in the mouth of a doctor, and she attains the grace of psychological healing: “Discrepancies of time, place, and person are irrelevant to the psyche, hence they vanish before the essential semantic identity.” But more happens than one heroine’s revelation: “Into the clinical case, the psychoanalytical interview, eternity steps unnoticed, and it transforms the psychoanalytical laboratory into eschatological theatre.” Or, expressed with an image of characteristically Schulzian violence:

  So it comes to pass that, when we pursue an inquiry into a character beyond a certain depth, we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life. The floorboards of the soul, to which we try to penetrate, fan open and reveal the starry firmament.

  To Schulz’s mind, primed by a Germanic mixture of Freud and Rilke, “Language is man’s metaphysical organ.” His brief essay “The Mythologizing of Reality” argues, decades before McLuhan, that the medium, language, is the message, delivering “Meaning or Sense” like some archetypal memory: “the word in its common usage today is only a fragment, remnant of some former all-embracing, integral mythology.” “Philosophy is actually philology,” not in the reductive sense that the old philosophical questions can be reduced to semantic confusions, but in the expansive sense of “the deep, creative exploration of the word”—“the primal word, the word that was not yet a sign but myth, story, sense.” We resist, perhaps, the mystical connotations of “primal word” (Schulz speaks of its “shimmering aura” and cites the Biblical “In the beginning was the Word”), but we should have no problem with the more pragmatic assertions that “the nameless does not exist for us” and “what is put into words is already half under control.” This potent act of taming gives Schulz’s language its reverent urgency, the solemn thickness of its magical conjurations. In an essay on himself written for the poet and editor Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Schulz said, “The role of art is to be a probe sunk into the nameless. The artist is an apparatus for registering processes in that deep stratum where value is formed.” The difference between art and philosophy “is not that art is a crossword puzzle with the key hidden, and philosophy the same crossword puzzle solved. The difference lies deeper than that. In a work of art the umbilical cord linking it with the totality of our concerns has not yet been severed, the blood of the mystery still circulates; the ends of the blood vessels vanish into the surrounding night and return from it full of dark fluid.”

  The image is typically visceral: Schulz in his fiction everywhere strives to physicalize the immaterial, rendering atmospheres into “plasmas,” showing skies to be weighty accumulations, thickening and slowing the passage of appearances so that the reader becomes sleepy with the heavy verbal richness. It is as in his “Autumn,” published here for the first time in English:

  The vast cavernous beds, piled high with chilly layers of sheets and blankets, waited for our bodies. The night’s floodgates groaned under the rising pressure of dark masses of slumber, a dense lava that was just about to erupt and pour over its dams, over the doors, the old wardrobes, the stoves where the wind sighed.

  Images crowd toward virtual gridlock, a frozen carnival of gnarled accuracies:

  Autumn looks for herself in the sap and primitive vigor of the Dürers and Breughels. That form bursts from the overflow of material, hardens into whorls and knots, seizes matter in its jaws and talons, squeezes, ravishes, deforms, and dismisses it from its clutches imprinted with the marks of this struggle as half-formed hunks, with the brand of uncanny life stamped in the grimaces extruded from their wooden faces.

  Schulz’s drawings and cliché-verre etchings—over fifty are reproduced here, at a generally stingy size, in a busy, choppy format full of photographs and border lines—have relatively little of this passionate reification. They accept conventions of doll-like stylization in depicting women, and most of the men look like Schulz in his photographs—twisted and foreshortened as if by some unconscious evasive maneuver. Though skillful and earnest in their fashion, the drawings also seem wooden and constrained, falling short of the pornography implicit in their ambience of deshabille, whips, and greasy hatching. Juliusz Flaszen, an acquaintance, recalled of Schulz in the late Twenties, “He was morbidly shy; I was right, I think, in setting him down as suffering from an inferiority complex. One day he brought along his paintings and drawings and asked for my opinion. The great part of this work consisted of pen and pencil sketches which in their thematics and technique recalled [Félicien] Rops. The chief motif was male sexual enslavement to the beautiful contours of the female body.” One etching, from a cycle titled A Book of Idolatry, shows a naked woman, attended by a winged minion and elevated upon a fanciful couch, pressing her bare foot down into the face of a male adorer in suit and shoes. Others show men crawling and crouching on the floor, and half transformed into beasts. Schulz’s work was admired, and his exhibits nearly always sold out—“at wretched prices,” Flaszen added. “His self-esteem was so low that he always feared to overcharge.” Schulz’s graphic skills continued to serve him in darker times. After Drohobycz was occupied by the Soviets in 1939, local authorities commissioned from Schulz, according to an editorial note, “portraits of Stalin and scenes symbolizing the joys of annexation, painted in the obligatory manner of Socialist Realism.” When the Nazis moved in, his drawings were admired by a Gestapo agent, who hired Schulz to decorate his child’s bedroom with murals. In one version of his death, “he was shot in the street by a Gestapo officer who had a grudge against another Nazi, Schulz’s temporary ‘protector’ who liked his paintings.”§ He was killed out of spite, like a pet dog.

  The horrors of German rule over Poland permeate this book of remnants; its scraps of salvaged correspondence smell of slaughter and incineration. Vast numbers of his letters perished in the Holocaust, as did most of his correspondents. Before the war, Schulz in his loneliness was a dedicated letter-writer. In 1936 he wrote to Romana Halpern, “It is a pity we didn’t know each other a few years ago; I was still able to write beautiful letters then. It was out of my letters that Cinnamon Shops [the literal title of The Street of Crocodiles] gradually grew. Most of these letters were addressed to Debora Vogel.” All of Schulz’s letters to Vogel, an avant-garde poet and novelist, have vanished, as have his letters to another early encourager, Wladyslaw Riff, and to Schulz’s fiancée, Józefina Szelinska, and to “muses” (as Schulz called them) like Maria Chazen and Zofia Nalkowska, and to Thomas Mann, whom Schulz admired next only to Rilke and to whom he confided the manuscript of his one German-language narrative, Die Heimkehr. Die Heimkehr has vanished, as has The Messiah and all the trove of “papers, notes, and correspondence” which Schulz told Izydor Friedman he had deposited with a “Catholic outside the ghetto.” Friedman, one of the few witnesses to Schulz’s life to survive the war, claimed, “Unfortunately he did not give me the person’s name, or possibly I forgot it.” No advertisement or search has discovered the person, or the cache—though Ficowski has lately expressed to journalists his belief that The Messiah will still be found.

  Only four letters survive of those written before the publication of Schulz’s first book in 1934. The surge of epistolary energy that helped create this book ebbed after its publication, though there are still flashes of poetic extravagance, of Schulz’s visionary materialization of feelings. To Tadeusz Breza he wrote in 1934, “People’s weakness delivers their souls to us, makes them needy. That loss of an electron ionizes them and renders them suitable for chemical bonding,” and, later in the year, “For you must realize that my nerves have been stretched thin like a net over the entire handicraft center, have crept along the floor
, smothered the walls like tapestry and covered the shops and the smithy with a dense web.” His powers of expression revived in his last extended correspondence, with Ania Plockier, a young painter killed at the age of twenty-six by the Ukrainian militia. “More and more I have occasion to realize,” he told her, “that delight with the world, spasms of disinterested joy, are only forms of personal hope, generalized pictures of vitality projected onto the artist’s sensitivity.” And he managed now and then to toss off a Schulzian gem of description: “On one early autumn evening we wandered through the park in the rain and behind our backs the traffic of families, the most intimate family history, unfolded in lighted windows.”