by Stuart Kelly
Since Literature and Export Trade was never, it seems, even a possibility, should we mourn its absence? Pound embroiled himself in the worst excesses of the period through his hastily conceived notions of economics, and it might be salient to show that Eliot’s more measured understanding inoculated him against enthusing over social credit or legal tender with built-in obsolescence. Similarly, if Literature and Export Trade had examined how the differing literary markets in America and Britain operated, or how the importation of experimental foreign literature influenced writers in a way that then had an impact back onto the original culture, it would have been intriguing.
But as it is, Literature and Export Trade is most likely two fingers flicked by a bored and depressed writer at the relentlessly mundane profession he reluctantly espoused. The existence of just a title permits a modicum of insight and a plethora of possibility.
Thomas Edward Lawrence
{1888–1935}
THE MYTH OF T. E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) frequently threatens to supplant the man. The gaunt good looks of Peter O’Toole playing Lawrence on film surreptitiously overwrite his actual jut of jaw. Lawrence could, in fact, imagine himself on celluloid, but only as a creation of Walt Disney. Versions and variations multiply: a mental patient was discovered impersonating him. He changes his name by deed poll after his own breakdown. One friend sees in him a mirror for all men; another thinks that the only hope for Britain is a pact between Lawrence and Hitler. One biographer describes him as evolving into “the Truly Strong Man”; another denounces him as an “impudent mythomaniac” and a closet homosexual prone to panic attacks. The image fabricated for him jostles with the image projected by him. He was an illegitimate child who nonetheless became, in his own words, “a sublimated Aladdin, the thousand and second knight.” He colluded in and distanced himself from his own persona. In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom he claims to have personally destroyed seventy-nine bridges during the Arabian revolt; in fact, he had blown up twenty-three.
Given the manifold contradictions, evasions, self-aggrandizements, and mystifications of his character, it is in keeping that the manuscript history of his most famous work, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is also tainted by these traits. Lawrence may have helped liberate the Middle East from Turkish rule, but he aspired to being a small publisher of Modernist prose. The form as we have it was first published in 1922—the Oxford Edition—with a print run of six copies. A subscriber’s edition, lavishly illustrated with avant-garde color plates, was issued in 1926, at the exorbitant price of thirty guineas. Lawrence was cagey about how many copies actually existed: 128 were sold to subscribers, and several other copies were given to friends. George Doran published twenty-two copies in the USA, with ten going on sale at $20,000 per volume. Although an abridged edition was available, there was no full edition for the general public until after Lawrence’s death. Enigmatic as ever, Lawrence wrote a book he thought the equivalent of War and Peace or Moby-Dick, but attempted to control its reading—unless, of course, it was a superbly managed promotional campaign.
Lawrence’s account of the part he played in the Arab Revolt between 1916 and 1918 began its existence as a travel book. According to Robert Graves, Lawrence started a book in 1910 about the Crusaders and Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus, and Medina, but destroyed the manuscript. All that remained was the title, reused for his wartime memoirs. Lawrence also burned the second manuscript version of this work, a version he referred to as the “original-and-to-be-kept secret,” while rewriting the text that was eventually published. This problematic approach to authorship continued after The Seven Pillars of Wisdom finally appeared; in his study of RAF life, The Mint, written under the pseudonym 352087 A/c Ross, Lawrence’s dedication to Edward Garnett reads: “You dreamed I came one night with this book crying, ‘It’s a masterpiece. Burn it.’ Well—as you please.”
The first draft disappeared in Reading station. Lawrence was traveling from London to Oxford in the autumn of 1919, and stopped in the refreshment room, with the manuscript in a black banker’s bag, which he put under the table. Although he claimed the bag was stolen, he also confided to another biographer, Liddell Hart, that perhaps he involuntarily allowed it to be lost. The subsequent versions were “shorter, snap-pier and more truthful”; but, given his propensity for tweaking and finessing the truth, even that statement cannot be taken as definitive.
Take, for example, the infamous Der’a incident. In the Oxford Edition, Lawrence clearly, though subtly, refers to some kind of sexual molestation when he was captured by a Turkish bey. Despite graphically described torture, he nonetheless escapes and is back in active service remarkably quickly. One letter has been widely interpreted as hinting at a certain willing submission, despite the assertion in the same epistle that Lawrence even found that writing about what happened made him sick. Legions of biographers must have dreamed that the manuscript lost at Reading made clear not only what had happened, but what Lawrence felt about it. That such a traumatic event could be immediately and unambiguously poured into words seems psychologically implausible.
What is certain is that if the first draft was stolen, then the lightfingered culprit had a bag of papers more valuable than banknotes or bullion, had he or she the patience to allow the contents to maximize their value. With copies of the printed version changing hands at auction for between £20,000 and £30,000, and individual autograph letters reaching as much as £2,000, a nearly complete first draft would be an exceptionally precious commodity—indeed, most auction houses would only venture a whistle and repeat the word “thousands” a few times. The price of Lawrence’s private pain increases exponentially, as collectors and biographers alike conspire in the idea that behind the array of self-made and imposed icons, there must be a confession with the aura of incontrovertible truth.
Bruno Schulz
{1892–1942}
I am simply calling it The Book without any epithets or qualifications, and in this vast sobriety there is a shade of helplessness, a silent capitulation before the vastness of the transcendental, for no word, no allusion, can adequately suggest the shiver of fear, the presentiment of a thing without name that exceeds all our capacity for wonder.
SO BEGINS “THE BOOK,” the first piece in Bruno Schulz’s second collection, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Like its predecessor, Cinnamon Shops (in English, retitled The Street of Crocodiles), it is a series of linked short stories, where the Galician town of Drohobycz is transmogrified and metamorphosed through the eyes of the narrator, Joseph N. The Book in “The Book” was an epiphanic volume glimpsed in childhood: his father would later attempt to pass off the Bible as the Book; another character maintains they have been using its pages to wrap up sandwiches and butcher’s meat. Recapturing the vision of this lost book is a subterranean motif in Schulz. It also, tragically, mirrors the fate of his own work.
Bruno Schulz was a quiet, frightened man, who taught drawing at the King Władysław Jagiełło State Gymnasium in his beloved Drohobycz. His graphics, depicting grotesque, squat men—weird hybrids of Chagall and the Golem—and impossibly elegant women, were gradually earning acclaim, though barely replacing his income. He was also, along with his friend Władysław Riff, experimenting with prose. When Riff died in 1927, Schulz lost a creative spur as well as a trusted friend: it would take him six years to present his stories to a publisher. Riff died of tuberculosis, and the sanitary officers who disinfected his lodgings, through fear of an epidemic, or in sheer carelessness, burned all of Riff’s manuscripts, and his letters from Schulz. He was, at one time, engaged to be married to Józefina Szelinska, whom he helped to translate Kafka’s The Trial into Polish: his name was erroneously substituted for hers on the title page.
Drohobycz was the universe for Schulz. It was itself and a kabbalistic symbol for everywhere; not a microcosm so much as a metaphor. Although he spent one vacation in Paris, he scurried, like an inverted smolt, back to the village, in that piece of Poland that
had become Austrian Galicia and would soon careen between Germany and the Soviet Union. It is today part of Ukraine.
Schulz knew he had to leave. He hoped, no doubt, that he would return. And he made sure his manuscripts were safe. Zbigniew Moron, a friend of Schulz, remembered his saying he had left his work with “someone else whom I did not know, he told me the name, but unfortunately I completely forgot it.” To Izydor Friedman, with whom he was sorting a hoard of looted books for the local Gestapo officer, Felix Landau, Schulz confided that a “Catholic from outside of the ghetto” had his papers for safekeeping.
As early as 1934, Schulz had mentioned a novel in progress, entitled Messiah. The work was painstaking, and frequently deferred, or laid aside: sometimes he was silent about it, other times he merely said he was stalled. Those who heard him read sections claim it began with Joseph N being woken by his mother, who tells him, excitedly, that the Messiah has been seen in a village only thirty kilometers from Drohobycz. No one knew much more than that. In a letter Schulz described the book as a “regression” to a time of “fullness and limitlessness . . . My ideal is ‘to mature’ into childhood.” As he worked on Messiah, the past must have seemed increasingly Edenic.
He was planning to leave the day he was shot. Fake travel documents and Aryan identity papers had been obtained through sympathetic friends. He had survived the German occupation since he was the protégé of Felix Landau, for whom he painted his children’s nursery, catalogued his looted books, and even produced a portrait. Landau was not, however, some SS Schindler. He had murdered the Jewish barber who had been designated as a “necessary Jewish worker” for the neighboring Gestapo chief, Karl Günther. Günther, in return, killed Schulz, and later boasted to Landau, “You killed my Jew—I killed yours.”
In 1987, the Polish poet and renowned Schulz scholar Jerzy Ficowski was telephoned by a man who announced himself as the illegitimate son of Bruno Schulz’s elder brother, Izydor. Alex Schulz had been contacted in California by a New Yorker who claimed to be from Lwów, near Drohobycz. This unnamed individual had seen a package, weighing approximately two kilograms, containing eight drawings, the rest being made up of manuscript pages written in Polish. Two kilograms is approximately 1,500 printed paperback pages. It was, he said, by Bruno Schulz, and worth, he presumed, $10,000.
Time passed. Alex Schulz contacted Ficowski to say their mysterious seller had been in touch again, then went silent. Ficowski later learned that Alex had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He never passed on the name of his contact. Had that been the end of the story, one would be forgiven for thinking that a tragic accident had curtailed an unseemly plot to con a professor and a relative.
But in 1990, the Swedish ambassador to Poland, Jean Christophe Öberg, contacted Ficowski. At a diplomatic meeting, a Soviet civil servant had let him know that a packet of papers had been found, misshelved, in the KGB archives relating to the Gestapo. The top sheet announced the novel Messiah.
The USSR was in the last throes of collapse. Visas were denied, for duplicitous and then paranoid reasons. Öberg died of cancer. His discreet lips had never passed on the name of the source in the archive. The Soviet Union fragmented. This particular Messiah’s first coming is hopefully still in the pending tray of a minor bureaucrat in a former superpower.
Ernest Hemingway
{1899–1961}
IF THERE WERE a prize for the most accident-prone author, Ernest Hemingway would have won it before he received either the Pulitzer or the Nobel. He broke bones in several car crashes, escaped from one plane crash, contracted anthrax, was grazed by several bullets and on occasion actually shot, cut his eyeball, suffered congestion of the kidneys and liver problems, pulled a skylight down on himself, and endured countless bashes, scrapes, knocks, collapses, and tumbles.
One accident, however, rendered even this most macho of authors speechless. In 1922, Hadley Hemingway (the first of his four wives) was traveling to Switzerland with her husband’s effects. At the time, Ernest had written much, but very little had been published. He had managed “six perfect sentences,” and was already well advanced in a novel about his experiences in the First World War. Among the valises and trunks Hadley was transporting was a case with everything Ernest had written to date. Somehow, it was stolen.
He had been developing a theory that even if something was edited out of a work of art, its trace would linger. Now he had to face the full ramifications, the reductio ad absurdum, of this idea. The fact that both Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein had told him to ditch everything he had written and start again must have been little comfort. Every author produces juvenilia. Most destroy it. The theft of Hemingway’s manuscripts short-circuited the whole process. Had he spent the next ten years trying to perfect his immature jottings, we might never have seen the novels of which he was capable.
The image of Hemingway—“Papa,” the boxer, fisher, hunter, brawler—almost eradicates the fresh-faced, unpublished, and nervous boy of 1922. Of course, he harbored the germs of his combative persona: apropos of the death of Joseph Conrad, two years later, Hemingway wrote in Transatlantic Review that if “by grinding Mr. [T. S.] Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Conrad’s grave” he might resurrect the novelist, then “early tomorrow morning with a sausage-grinder” he would leave for London. But the bullish façade was still under construction, not yet concrete. The day after Hadley, distraught, arrived without a significant piece of luggage, Hemingway traveled to confirm that everything—every sheaf, notebook, and carbon copy—was truly gone. They were.
“I remember what I did in the night after I let myself into the flat and found it was true,” he wrote, but never revealed whether rage, or booze, or even tears were his response. Despite his fame as a crack shot and tenacious angler, what grizzled Old Hem really felt about the books that got away is unknown—though he later claimed he would have opted for surgery if it might remove the memory of the loss. His motto—il faut (d’abord) durer—one must (above all) endure—was tested as much by pen and ink as on the savannah and the open seas.
Dylan Marlais Thomas
{1914–1953}
IF NOTHING ELSE, Dylan Thomas is most people’s idea of a modern poet. He is the hybrid of celebrity and poverty, swanning around in New York and schlepping about in Swansea, a potbellied genius and an evangelical boozer, with a permanent cigarette at a chipper angle in the corner of his mouth. Honey-tongued and beery-breathed, he is heading for the grave and immortality. What’s more, his poetry is supposedly incomprehensible. The critic Kenneth Hopkins referred to the battle between “the scoffers and the understanders,” and academics challenged their students to discern meanings in the one-night stands between words. What did “a grief ago” or “flowered anchor” actually signify?
Thomas was allergic to the notion that his poetry was meaningless. He hated Surrealism, and joked that in Hell, particular sinners (like the editor of Verse) will “for all eternity . . . read the cantos of Ezra Pound to a company of red-hot devils.” The poems are oblique, even cryptic, but they are not inchoate blathering. Riddles have solutions, ciphers can be decoded: as he said to his publishers, “every line is meant to be understood.” The poems had their veritas, even though it sprang from, and might only be glimpsed again, in vino.
How many good ideas did Thomas piss up against a wall? The BBC commissioned a translation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and Thomas’s unreliability, strident demands for more money, and chaotic personal life ensured that we can never know what he would have made of that irrepressible, feckless, flamboyant failure. In July 1940, he assured Laurence Pollinger, who was standing in for his regular agent, David Higham, that his publishers would see a short novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade, “quite soon”; in September 1953 he was telling E. F. Bozman of J. M. Dent publishers that he was “so glad” that they would reconsider the same book, and that “when I come back from America, I intend to settle down & finish it.” Thomas died in New York on November 9 of that year.
In March 1948, Thomas was pitching to the Picture Post that he would love to write an article about Laugharne, where he had settled briefly, and which he would return to as a permanent address the next year. During the course of his proposal, he mentioned, en passant, that he was writing a radio play set there. The project would variously be called The Town That Was Mad and Llareggub (which, in typically Thomasy form, needs to be read backwards to get the joke). Picture Post declined to offer a commission, and another attempt to capture the cadences and accidents of rural Welsh life was postponed.
Ten years beforehand, Thomas had tried another tack. Writing to the aspiring poet Meurig Walters, he outlined a concept that he said he had sent to Keidrych Rhys, the editor of Wales magazine: a “mass-poem.” Based on the principles of mass observation, the notional poem “Wales” would involve all the contributors to the magazine writing a “verse-report of his own particular town, village or district”; and the resulting entries, by random arrangement rather than editorial decision, should make up a whole poem. Thomas was eager to solicit Walters as the Rhondda writer. However, no letter to Keidrych Rhys has ever surfaced, and it may be that Thomas, in true drink-sodden fashion, mistook a promise to himself to do something for the sense that he actually had.
