by C. D. Rose
17 It is, ironically, one of the most discussed of all the Guyavitch stories. The curious notion that the story is somehow “cursed” has been floated by some readers, possibly simply because it is excised from a number of editions of the stories, replaced with a blank page or erasure marks. That it is the key to all of Guyavitch’s work, as some feverish commentators have suggested, is an interesting idea, but if so, I fear what may lie behind any door it would open.
18 The ultimate “late style” being—as Babel has it—“the genre of silence.”
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
THE WORLD OF Guyavitch studies is large, often obscure, and mostly perplexing. Listed here are but a few of the books and essays that, I hope, the reader may find of use or interest. To present a full catalogue would be an impossible, inexhaustible task, but know that the work is out there, waiting for you, when it is time.
Reading Guyavitch: A Critical Introduction, Jean Lefevre and Jeanne Lefebvre, eds. (Agloe University Press, 1978)
There is a corpus of critical literature on Guyavitch, a body of work that abounds in prepositions and hesitations. This collection contains a number of such essays: Weissbrot’s “Towards a Hermeneutics of Doubt: The Cases of Felisberto Hernández and Maxim Guyavitch,” Whitbread’s “An Approach to the Unapproachable: Reading Kafka through Guyavitch,” and Panebianco’s “Against Certainty: Guyavitch and Krzhizhanovsky.” As well as these, this book contains Freudian, Lacanian, Foucauldian, Derridean, Deleuzian, Kristevan, and Barthesian readings of the stories. Not recommended for the general reader.
(Once, and only once, I was invited to attend the annual conference of the Guyavitch Society. When I arrived at the designated location, I found nothing but a crumpled cigarette packet and two empty bottles of Zapovit. Since that day, I have heard nothing more of or from the Society, and cannot be sure they exist any longer.)
The Nine Chairs, Bernd Holer (Molloy & Malone, 1956)
Although Guyavitch is never mentioned in this slim, allusive, enigmatic, and elegiac novel, I am certain it is based on him. The unnamed main character sits in a room empty save for the titular chairs, reflecting on his slim, allusive, enigmatic, and elegiac life.
A Cartography of Loss: My Search for Guyavitch’s Places, Lilian Mountweazel (Argleton Press, 2009)
There are some few dedicated pilgrims who have spent their lives trying to locate the villages or towns in which they believe Guyavitch’s stories to be set. It’s Plovdiv, they say, or Cluj, or Drohobych. It’s in Galicia, Moravia, Transdniestria.
A Cartography of Loss is the story of one woman’s quest to find these places, rendered interesting only by her utter refusal to acknowledge an important truth: the places she is looking for do not exist.
Guyavitch’s stories, surely, aren’t based in any particular village or town, but an amalgam of places, a superimposition of one upon another. Mountwealze, however, does accept this.
This book reminds me of another title, which I shall not name, by a reasonably well-known mid-twentieth-century writer who claimed to have a great friendship with a much-better-known mid-twentieth-century writer. The book she wrote about this friendship is fascinating, but mostly because it fairly rapidly becomes clear to the reader that she hardly knew him at all, that their “friendship” was almost entirely wishful thinking on her part. It’s the lack of self-awareness that makes this supposed memoir become a classic of unreliable narration.
As Mountwealze travels from Leipzig to Brno, from Sarajevo to Kraków, from Lvov to Odessa, she tells us more about her own life (which is, in truth, dull) than about Guyavitch, about whom she seems to know very little.
Reisen mit einer magischen Lanterne: eine Geheimnisse des deutschen Kinos, Katerina Brac (Exit Verlag, 1967)
To say that Guyavitch’s work has cinematic qualities is axiomatic; that the stories have never been filmed is baffling. This memoir tells the story of how it was once, at least, attempted.
Brac (a poet herself) claims to be a distant relation to Ana Brac, a filmmaker who worked in Germany in the early 1900s. “My great-aunt first appears,” Brac writes, “as if by magic, at the beginning of a century, riding the endless flat countryside, from one Kinotopp to another, country fairs or village halls, Denmark to Poland, carrying magic lanterns and shadow puppets, fat wax candles and lightbulbs as delicate as soap bubbles, each one a miracle in itself. Flying horses, glass palaces, sea monsters, and princesses all carefully folded into a valise. She carried flickers and fades, wonders in a travelling bag. She would show children how she worked such magic, enchanting and enlightening them at the same time. Soon men would come with their Bioscopes and Vitascopes, dismissing tricks for ignorant peasants, promising life itself projected onto the bare white walls or starched sheets.
“Sometimes,” Brac continues, “my great-aunt would close herself away and watch nothing but the movement of shadows on the sides of the tent, or gaze at the quality of the light itself. She had the power to enchant herself as much as others.”
And then, she goes on, there was a relationship. One of her colleagues, perhaps; we know so little (and much of Brac’s account is pure speculation). There is a move to Berlin, or a town just outside, where a new city is being built: Babelsberg. The mountain of babble, of languages, their own holy wood.
She makes films, perhaps appears in them herself. Her name appears on one-reelers ranging from low-rent rip-offs (Lupin Arsène Meets Herlock Sholmes) to high-concept schlock horror (The Nights of Pierre Andrézel), a whole sequence of comedies and tragedies involving gamblers, stolen paintings, train crashes, mysterious doubles, apparitions.
At some point around this time, the reader can intuit, Brac must have read the Guyavitch stories, or perhaps even known the man himself. She draws a group of people around her, two men (Max and Jules) and two women (Maria and Olga) and they drive north. Their journey to the Baltic coast and the summer they spent filming there (an inordinate amount of time, given that most films of this period were knocked out in an afternoon) is described at length. At a certain point, Maria and Olga both leave. The wind became too much for them.
Brac finds an archive that notes that a film titled Grünezähne and bearing her great-aunt’s name, running to an hour in length (rare in that period), was shown in a number of cinemas in the early 1920s, but no copies survive. (Silver nitrate, so fickle.)
And what I wonder, on reading this book, is not what happened to this film of the story “Jenny Greenteeth,” but if Brac may have been influential in its composition. Perhaps it was not a film of the story, but perhaps the story is of the film.
“Notes on the Whimsical,” David Kingston (unpublished)
Guyavitch’s writing has sometimes been dismissed as “merely whimsical.” Needless to say, I do not hold with this opinion. That said, however, this essay (which came into my hands via the author himself1) caused me to rethink. Kingston begins with Susan Sontag’s observation in “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” that “many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described,” then makes a claim that the Whimsical is, or should be, a critical category, an aesthetic, a tradition, a field all of its own, standing alongside the Gothic, the Pastoral, and the Classical. “The Whimsical,” he continues, “is the realm of provincial art galleries, random museums (pens, pencils, straw, salt), waking dreams, Sunday afternoons, late October, villages or regions but not cities or nations.”
We do not, sadly, have space here for the whole essay, but I will quote selectively below:
While pareidolia—as long as it’s not sinister—is often Whimsical, and anthropomorphism usually is, things like pictures of dogs playing cards are definitely not Whimsical. This is partly due to their ubiquity. The Whimsical is always liminal, half-remembered, half-imagined, even as it is taking place.
Walter Benjamin on Robert Walser’s stories: “If we w
ere to attempt to sum up in a single phrase the delightful yet also uncanny element in them, we would have to say: they have all been healed.” There is no better definition of the Whimsical.
Natalie Babel said her father’s stories do “not differentiate between important and trivial details.” This could be seen as a characteristic of the Whimsical.
The Whimsical is neither masculine nor feminine. Such categories are so tiresome, after all, and so arbitrary, so inadequate. The Whimsical resists the macho. In its list-making and collecting, its love of detail, its pleasure in the intricate, the small-scale, the miniature; if it is masculine, then it is the masculinity of the garden shed. This may be the Whimsical’s most important contribution.
Ulysses is whimsical: lists, questions, minutiae.
In the realm of the Whimsical, death is just one more thing that might happen.
Things in life can seem Romantic, or Fantastic, or Surreal. So little of life is Whimsical, and this perhaps, is life’s tragedy.
The Whimsical: funny about serious things; serious about funny things.
There is the tiny, and there is the vast. There is the subatomic order of things, and the universal, eternal, beyond comprehension. Much that lies in between these two things is dull, or inexplicable, or mundane. The Whimsical is the first of these two things, but always has a tacit understanding, knowledge, or awareness of the latter.
Realism reduces the universal to a human scale; the Whimsical makes it smaller.
The qualities of lightness and quickness as described by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millennium are key elements of the Whimsical.
“The tone does not suit the subject: it detracts from the serious message”—a common criticism of the (misunderstood) Whimsical.
The Whimsical is never ironic, though our enjoyment of it may be.
An incomplete list of the Whimsical:
Black light theatre; Brian Eno’s Obscure Records (1975–1978); Bruegel (the elder); Burano; Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum; clocks (water, cuckoo, grandfather, alarm, whatever—all clocks, any clocks); Daniil Kharms; dioramas; Edmund Dulac; Edward Gorey; Edward Lear; Erik Satie; expressionism; footnotes; Georges Perec; hockets; Ivor Cutler; Jacques Tati; Jan Švankmajer; Jaromir Hladík; Jill McDonald’s illustrations for Puffin Books; Joseph Cornell; Juan Muñoz; Kafka’s “Kübelreiter”; Kleist’s essay “The Puppet Theatre”; Yayoi Kusama; Lewis Carroll; lighthouses; lists; Lotte Reiniger; Marc Chagall; Marcel Schwob’s life (but not his work); marionettes; metronomes; Moon Wiring Club; Zazie dans le Métro (book and film); mime (but Lecoq, not Marceau); midafternoons; the mise en abyme; Nabokov (but Pnin, not Pale Fire); Nikolai Leskov; Yuri Norstein; Oliver Postgate; Ana Maria Pacheco; ‘pataphysics; Paul Klee; penny-in-the-slot automata; pillow books; Portmeirion; Richard Brautigan; Edith Rimmington; Rie Nakajima; short stories with long titles; small things that should be large; large things that should be small; stop-motion animation; the bass clarinet; the glockenspiel; the celeste, the harmonium (but not the harpsichord); E-flat minor; a trio or quintet, but not a quartet; the sound of a musical box, but rarely the object itself; the last ten minutes of 8 ½; the Brothers Quay; The Tempest; the train scene from Spirited Away; umbrellas; Valerie and Her Week of Wonders; windmills; Wunderkammern.
I have an acquaintance at a university that has a chair of both Pseudo and Crypto Bibliography,2 and thought that the essay might interest her. I sent her a copy, and she replied, somewhat brusquely, I feel: “Meretricious persiflage. Do not bother with this unless you want to sabotage what little semblance of a career you already have.”
Maxim Guyavitch: A Life, Alfred Huggenberger (Thomson & Thompson, 1978)
Maxim Guyavitch: A Life, Johannes Jegerlehner (Dupond and Dupont, 1978)
Not often, but with surprising regularity, it happens that two biographers (or sometimes novelists) happen upon the same subject at the same time. Apart from the opening of an old archive or some obscure movement of the zeitgeist, quite why this should be isn’t clear, and quite why it should happen in 1978, with Guyavitch, of all people, is even less so. But happen it did, and in Switzerland to boot.
Huggenberger and Jegerlehner had been promising young poets, but both had given way to mediocrity in middle age. Their rivalry remained undiminished, however, and was further inflamed when they discovered that each was working on a biography of a writer they each considered “theirs.” The scarcity of material can only have aggravated matters.
When the books came out (on the same day), reviewers didn’t know which to review, so reviewed neither. Only one attempted to review both books, but unfortunately mistook Huggenberger’s for Jegerlehner’s, and vice versa. Both books rapidly went out of print, and are now unobtainable.
The two biographers challenged each other to a knife fight, and—in the course of their duel—fell off the side of a small mountain near Lake Lucerne.
The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, C. D. Rose, ed. (Melville House, 2014)
While it may seem somewhat gauche to recommend one’s own work, I include this for two reasons. Firstly, to introduce the neophyte to the expanded field of study, and secondly, to acknowledge the question often asked of me: namely, why I hadn’t included Guyavitch in the volume. (The answer being that having had several stories published, and some form of afterlife, Guyavitch was not eligible for the Dictionary’s strict selection criteria.)
The Guyavitch Heresy, Max Gate (William & Wilson, 1982)
Written in the style of a breathless thriller rather than a piece of literary scholarship, this would be a welcome addition to the occasionally over-arcane world of Guyavitch scholarship, were it not for the fact that it is complete rubbish. I include it here only to advise the reader not to bother with it.
Gate, a rare Englishman in the world of Guyavitch studies, here claims that Guyavitch did not really exist but was concocted by a group of writers as a means of promoting spurious nationalism via the creation of a literary heritage.3 Members of the mysterious cabal behind this were all, according to Gate, later assassinated.
Gate’s own provenance was later discovered to be questionable, and more interesting than this book. He was believed to have been a Soviet spy, but files recently released suggest that he was perhaps in the pay of the US Secret Services, informing both on the Soviets and the British. The reality is so confused, it is quite possible that Gate didn’t quite know who he was informing on, or quite why. What is not in doubt is that he was channelling some major funding for ideologically approved cultural projects. Whether this was from the CIA directly or via a trans-global drug cartel has yet to be ascertained.
Gate later disappeared. His neatly folded clothes and parked car were found on a beach near Budleigh Salterton in 1986. No body was ever recovered.
The Guyavitch Fallacy, Marcel Mannbrotz (Bendrix and Bazakbal, 2018)
I once met Marcel Mannbrotz, and he was not amongst my admirers.4 That said, this book is a trenchant and incisive look at much of the cant that surrounds the world of Guyavitch studies. Mannbrotz thoroughly debunks not only Gate’s book (mentioned above) but all the other pseudo-conspiracies and theories that surround Guyavitch and his work. Especial disdain is reserved for the acolytes and obsessives who see the work as infallible, as Mannbrotz notes the slipshod, patchwork quality of a number of the stories. Ultimately, however, his own combination of zeal and vitriol results in him being as blind to nuance and possibility as those as he accuses. What should be a refreshing cold glass of water, a sharp knife through the knots of humbug and sophistry, actually results in little more than further revelation of Mannbrotz himself, who remains an unpleasant, sneering character.
Candle Grease and Donkey Shit, Ostap Bender (Progress Publishing, 1962)
While Guyavitch’s stories have often been said to possess cinematic qualities, few have noted their dramatic ones. This book, an account of a provincial to
uring theatre company in the late 1920s and early 1930s, includes one chapter that tells of an attempt to bring all of the nine stories to the stage. It was to be a kind of portmanteau performance, a whole evening in nine acts. An ensemble cast of two male and two female actors were to play all the parts. It was a brilliant idea. It was a disaster.
The tale of how it became so is brilliantly described by Bender in this book. Bender was the stagehand, props manager, lighting technician, and driver for the company, and he gives us his view, which manages to be both worm’s eye and panoramic. “Candle Grease” and “Donkey Shit” are the nicknames given to the two company managers, a hustling couple of self-appointed theatrical entrepreneurs regarded with little but disdain by the actors they employ. The actors themselves come across as charming, learned, over-educated, under-employed, tender, needy, vain, selfish, brittle, and fraudulent, much like actors anywhere. Bender is a pitiless narrator, and so much the better for it.
Anastasiya Bok: A Life, Vanessa Portle (QUP, 2002)
The life of Bok (1885–1932) is here delicately retraced by Dr. Portle. Bok was a writer of fragments who published little during her lifetime and was soon forgotten. She had correspondences with Dagny Juel, Stanisława Przybyszewska, Anastasiya Mirovich, and Olga Preobrazhenskaia. The most tantalising note in this book is the suggestion that she may have collaborated with Ana Brac. I am including this book here due to the slight possibility that Bok was actually Guyavitch. I have contacted Portle to further discuss this, but she has consistently refused to reply to my queries.
Salt, Oil, Blood (Galleria Carlo di Marafia, 1998)
The catalogue for an exhibition of paintings and installations inspired by Guyavitch. Poorly printed, and with a brief text by Fausto Squattrinato (composed in International Art English, misinformed and deeply unenlightening), this is mostly of interest because it was what sparked my interest in Guyavitch.
