In Search of Lost Books

by Giorgio van Straten

  It turns out that A Moveable Feast might well have had a different title, according to my friend Lorenzo Pavolini, the writer from whom I have gleaned some valuable information. Before choosing one of them, Hemingway would always devise several potential titles for his books. In this case, one of those potential titles was How Different It Was When You Were Here. How different everything was indeed. And yet he seems to be saying that it was precisely at this time, in this far-off and forgotten era, that he actually succeeded in becoming a writer.

  For reasons located somewhere between literary criticism and gossip, it would be intriguing to be able to peruse those lost papers, to revisit the origins of a master storyteller, however riddled they might be with errors and even horrors. It would be like wandering around the laboratory of someone who has not yet attained the formula you know they will soon succeed in finding. Because even if it is true that certain writers achieve ‘overnight’ success and even fame, it is equally true that they have become the particular writers they are only through a long and arduous process.

  In April 1961, three weeks before a failed suicide attempt and not long before the one that would kill him, Hemingway wrote:

  In writing there are many secrets. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in.

  Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away. In much later times than these stories of Paris you may not have it ever until you state it in fiction and then you will have to throw it away or it will be stolen again.

  Is the use of the word ‘stolen’ a mere coincidence? Or did Hemingway when writing it think again about that train compartment, about his first wife’s sudden thirst, about a suitcase that a thief would dump the moment he discovered its contents were worthless? And about the dash back to Paris, only to find that even the carbon copies could not be salvaged?

  He must have thought again about his first wife, and about the fruits of that apprenticeship, which none of us will ever be able to read.

  Poland, 1942:

  The Messiah Has Arrived in Sambor

  AMAN KILLS ANOTHER MAN’S SLAVE in order to spite him.

  We are not standing in the shadow of the pyramids, or in ancient Rome, or in a plantation in Louisiana before the War of Seccession. We are in Europe: the year is 1942, the place a small Polish village with the almost illegible name of Drohobycz, which I give thus because at the time it was part of Poland, though it is now part of Ukraine and would be written differently. The two men are Nazi officers: one is called Felix Landau, the other Karl Gunther. They have argued, and in order to assert himself and save face with his opponent, Gunther has murdered his slave, or rather his protégé – a diminutive Polish Jew whom Landau had taken under his wing because he liked his drawings, and had charged him with creating some murals in the bedrooms of his children.

  This small Jewish man who was so good at drawing was in fact not only one of the greatest Polish writers of the twentieth century but one of the greatest in Europe. His name was Bruno Schulz.

  He had been born precisely fifty years earlier, in 1892, in that very place from which he had rarely moved except for three years spent in Vienna, and he had published two volumes of short stories – Cinnamon Shops (1934) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937) – books in which he had described the life of the small town in which he lived, the myriad characters who made up its petty, captivating, banal and magical world, depicted in a vein that was fabular and oneiric but also anxiety-inducing and angst-ridden.

  Like a cross, in short, between Chagall and Kafka.

  ‘A gnome, a tiny man with a disproportionately large head, too timid to have the courage to exist, rejected by life, one who moved furtively at its margins’: this is how he was described by Witold Gombrowicz, his colleague and friend, if we can call this the description of a friend. And yet this unprepossessing and marginal person was a truly extraordinary writer.

  Since the mid-nineteen-thirties, Schulz had been at work on a novel called The Messiah – a novel he considered to be his magnum opus and which disappeared together with its author in 1942, in the heart of Poland, after a stupid altercation between two German officers.

  In what I consider to be his masterpiece, See Under: Love, the novelist David Grossman writes:

  People hear I’m interested in Bruno and send me all kinds of material. You’d be surprised how much has been written about him. Mostly in Polish. And I’ve come across a number of theories concerning his lost novel, The Messiah: that it’s about how Bruno lures the Messiah into the Drohobycz Ghetto with his spellbinding prose, or that it’s about the Holocaust and Bruno’s last years under the Nazi Occupation. But you and I know better, don’t we? Life is what interested Bruno. Simple, everyday life; for him the Holocaust was a laboratory gone mad, accelerating and intensifying human processes a hundredfold…

  Part of this novel is dedicated to Schulz, albeit a Schulz who in the narrative has been transformed into a fish – or more precisely into a salmon, swimming back upstream against the current of seas and rivers.

  In addition to the story of his remarkable life, this lost work by Bruno Schulz has inspired many writers. Cynthia Ozick has written a novel about The Messiah and its mysterious reappearance in Stockholm – we shall see how fiction sometimes anticipates reality – and there is a work by the Italian writer Ugo Riccarelli entitled A Man Called Schulz, Perhaps. It often happens that lost books have the potential to generate new ones, prompting other writers to fill the void that has been created in their wake. But the task of the writer, as Mario Vargas Llosa once remarked, consists of ‘lying with good reason’. And not only when transforming Bruno Schulz into a fish.

  But are we really sure, as Grossman suggests, that The Messiah disappeared without anyone having ever set eyes on it?

  Before seeking an answer to this question, let’s try to establish whether the book ever actually existed in the first place.

  Bruno Schulz lets it be known that he is working on it in a series of letters written between 1934 and 1939. From these letters we also gather that for him it was the Novel, with a real capital N; something that had come after a period of great difficulty, partly caused by the breakup of his engagement to Josefina Szelinska, after she had failed to convince him to leave his native town to go and live with her in Warsaw. Amongst other things, this relationship had led him to question his Jewish faith, to the extent that he had even considered converting to Catholicism, without knowing that his fiancée was herself a convert. It was probably the breakup of this relationship that caused a rapprochement with the faith of his forefathers, with that Jewish culture which gives central importance to the Messiah who has yet to come.

  Another factor confirms that the novel not only existed but was nearing completion: the important Polish critic and intellectual Artur Sandauer, a friend of Schulz’s, has said that in 1936, during a vacation, the writer had read the beginning of the book to him. It went something like this:

  You know, my mother told me one morning that the Messiah has come, that he is already in the village of Sambor.

  Sambor was a village very close to Drohobycz.

  So we know that the novel existed. And there is more, if further proof were needed. It is possible in fact to actually read two of its chapters, ‘The Book’ and ‘The Genial Age’, which perhaps because they were complete and convincing in themselves, or simply extracted to bolster the collection, were included as free-standing stories in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. These two stories allow us to glimpse the visionary dimension that the novel must have had, in common with the characteristics of his other fiction.

  And then there are the illustrations, since this novel was intended to be illustrated by Schulz himself, an exceptional visual artist as well as a writer. Though the word ‘illustrated’ here is inadequate: drawings and text were i
ntended to work together as integral parts of the narrative, in a kind of graphic novel avant la lettre, so to speak. A number of these images from The Messiah have survived and come down to us, bearing further testimony to his work on the novel.

  The fact that writing and drawing were for Schulz part of the same creative impulse was made clear in an interview given in 1935 to his friend and fellow writer Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz:

  To the question as to whether my drawings manifest the same themes as my prose I would answer in the affirmative: they deal with different aspects of the same reality, […] the technique of drawing imposes more narrow limits than prose, which is why I think that I express myself more fully in writing.

  And it is those very drawings that allow us to understand Schulz’s world: an archaic, impoverished and static Jewish world very far removed from that of the Jews of Western Europe, and about to be swept away by the Nazi invasion, as Schulz himself seemed already to foresee in 1938 in the last of his stories to be published in his lifetime, ‘The Comet’:

  One day, on returning from school, my brother brought the improbable but perfectly true news that an end of the world was near. We asked him to repeat what he said, thinking that we must have misunderstood. But we had not.

  The Messiah existed, there can be no doubt about it. It was finished, or nearly finished when the news arrived – ‘improbable but true’ – that war had broken out and that Poland would be erased from the political geography of Europe, divided into two by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, with one part going to the Soviet Union and the other to Nazi Germany. Drohobycz found itself on the Russian side of this dividing line.

  During the period of the Soviet occupation, having seemingly already stopped writing in 1939, Schulz put many things away into safekeeping – entrusting them in particular to his colleague and friend Kazimierz Truchanowski. Some think that he also gave him the manuscript of The Messiah, though Schulz himself always denied this.

  Then, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in August 1941, Drohobycz came under Nazi control. From that moment on, the theories proliferate as to what Schulz did with his novel. Some maintain that the typescript was buried in a garden, others that it was hidden inside a wall; still others insist that it was concealed beneath the tiles of a floor. And so on, because many Jewish writers resorted to hiding their texts in this way in order to save them. At least one such hastily concealed manuscript was rediscovered decades later, and if I may be permitted a digression it is worth relating its story here.

  In 1978, in the course of renovating a property in Radom in Poland, two workmen found inside a wall they were demolishing a bottle containing strips of paper that had been written on in Yiddish. Their author was one Simha Guterman, and he had not survived the persecution. He had written a novel dealing directly with the lives of Polish Jews under Nazism, and had gradually concealed segments of it in various places, indicating their whereabouts to his son Yakov so that he might remember and recover them. His son survived the war and emigrated to Israel, but when he returned to Poland he had not been able to locate the nooks and crannies chosen by his father: a question of memory, no doubt, but also due to the fact that the country had been largely destroyed and rebuilt. Nevertheless, a single section re-emerged, thirty years later, thanks to workmen who decided not to discard along with the rubbish the paper-filled bottle they had found. And today we can read at least a part of that novel.

  The Messiah, however, has not turned up during some work of reconstruction in Drohobycz, and it is certain that amongst the many materials belonging to Schulz that have been patiently collected over the years by the Polish poet and scholar Jerzy Ficowski (the letters, drawings, notes that have contributed to the postwar rediscovery of the writer), his only novel is not to be found.

  *

  Many of the things I have mentioned thus far came to me courtesy of Francesco Cataluccio, a passionate and insightful scholar of Polish culture, as his book I’m Going to See If Things Are Better Over There demonstrates. He has shared with me everything he has discovered about Bruno Schulz over the course of many years. But the most incredible thing he had to tell me only emerged in the latest of my conversations with him.

  As already mentioned, one of the books devoted to Schulz and his lost novel is Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm. In this novel, published in 1987, the American author imagines that a man who believes himself to be Schulz’s son comes into contact in an antiquarian bookshop in Stockholm with a strange woman who claims that she has the manuscript of The Messiah in her possession. This manuscript will eventually be lost again – or rather burned by the person who considers it to be a forgery – but the protagonist will continue to ask himself whether it had really been that book.

  Well, a few years after the fall of the Soviet empire, at the beginning of the 1990s, the historian Bronisław Geremek (who was Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time) told Francesco Cataluccio about having been approached by a Swedish diplomat with news of an astonishing proposal. This diplomat had been contacted in Kiev (Drohobycz, remember, is now part of Ukraine) by a former agent of the KGB, or at any rate someone who claimed to be one and maintained that in the archives of the secret police there was a typescript of The Messiah by Bruno Schulz. And that if the Swedish government was interested, or could act as an intermediary with the government of Poland, he would be willing to sell it. Geremek managed to obtain a page of this typescript so that it could be examined by experts, including Jerzy Ficowski, in order to determine its authenticity. Their verdict was that it might actually be part of The Messiah. At which point the Swedish diplomat was given the funds necessary to acquire the text, and travelled with the required sum to the Ukraine.

  Perhaps he did in fact obtain the typescript, perhaps not. We cannot know for certain, since on his journey back the car in which he was travelling crashed and caught fire, killing both the diplomat and his driver.

  How the crash happened, and whether it was indeed an accident or something more sinister, it’s impossible to tell. Nor do we know whether the typescript was inside the car and therefore burned, as it was in Ozick’s novel – or if the diplomat was returning empty-handed, leaving open the possibility that, somewhere, it is still extant. Always assuming, of course, that the whole thing was not simply a scam, concocted in those confused and turbulent times in order to earn a sizeable sum of American dollars.

  Since then many have contacted Ficowski or the executor of Schulz’s literary estate (the son of his brother, now living in Switzerland), claiming to have the manuscript in their possession. But not a single one of these communications has ever come to anything.

  Moscow, 1852:

  A Divine Comedy of the Steppes

  IN ALL OF THE CASES that I have dealt with thus far, the disappearance of the lost books in question could hardly be attributed to those who actually wrote them, or to some culpable carelessness or involuntary complicity on the part of the author, as will turn out to be the case with Malcolm Lowry.

  In the story that I am relating here, however, it was the author’s very perfectionism, his desire to give to the world something superior to everything and everyone that had gone before him – an incomparable masterpiece – that doomed the work to inevitable failure. It was this very desire to produce a flawless work of art, one that could combine his thinking about both literature and morality, which ended up by precipitating a human as well as a creative tragedy.

  I am referring to Nikolai Gogol, one of the greats of nineteenth-century Russian literature and the author of such unforgettable stories as ‘The Overcoat’ and ‘The Nose’, and above all, the novel Dead Souls. It is this novel that is the victim of the story I am about to tell.

  Dead Souls can be found in any bookshop, yet what we are able to read under that title is in reality only the first part of what should have been a much longer work, designed to be even more impressive in scope. Five chapters of a second part have survived and are frequently included in an ap
pendix to the book we have, but they represent only a first draft that was abandoned by its author out of dissatisfaction with the work. According to Gogol’s conception of the novel, it should in fact have been tripartite – like a kind of Divine Comedy of the steppes – with an Inferno, a Purgatory and a Paradise.

  In the first part, the one published in the author’s lifetime, the protagonist Chichikov presents himself in a small provincial Russian town with the aim of acquiring ‘dead souls’ – that is to say serfs who have passed on to a better life but are still present in the census of the State, and for whom, consequently, their owners are still obliged to pay tax. What on earth can he be doing with them? Why is he buying them up? Everybody wants to know. Yet everyone is nevertheless quite willing to profit from selling them, in order to save on their taxes. And Chichikov profits substantially too, by mortgaging these nonexistent souls to raise capital to invest and to spend.

  Gogol based the story on a notorious case related to him by Pushkin, who was apparently somewhat annoyed by his friend’s subsequent creative appropriation of it.

  The first volume of Dead Souls came out in 1842, originally published for reasons of censorship under the title The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, since by definition souls were immortal and when combined with this adjective were better off being relegated to a subtitle. It was a resounding success. It was also an impossible book to categorize: brilliant, ironic, grotesque, realistic; all of these things at once. It was praised superlatively and attacked; vilified by reactionary critics and admired in the most progressive literary circles. Receiving the eulogies with what must have been an already healthy sense of his talent and its importance, Gogol began to think of himself as the greatest of them all: a kind of literary messiah sent to guide the people of Russia onto the right path. And it was this, perhaps, that caused him to lose his own way.