In English there is virtually no biographical information to be had concerning Schulz. It is known that his final manuscript, a novel called “The Messiah,” was carried for safekeeping to a friend; both friend and manuscript were swallowed up by the sacrificial fires of the Europe of 1942. All of Schulz’s letters, and two-thirds of the very small body of his finished work—two novels, one novella—remain untranslated and, so far, inaccessible to American readers. It is a powerful omission. Think what our notion of the literature of the Dark Continent of Europe would be like if we had read our way so late into the century without the most renowned of the stories in Red Cavalry, or without “Gimpel the Fool,” or without The Metamorphosis. A verbal landscape stripped of Babel or Singer or Kafka is unimaginable to us now, and it may turn out, in the wake of The Street of Crocodiles, that Schulz can stand naturally—or unnaturally—among those writers who break our eyes with torches, and end by demonstrating the remarkable uses of a purposeful dark.
In this dark the familiar looms freakish, and all of these—Babel as Cossack Jew, Singer purveying his imps and demiurges, Kafka with his measured and logical illogic—offer mutations, weird births, essences and occasions never before suspected. The Street of Crocodiles, at one with that mythic crew, is a transmogrified Drogobych: real town and real time and real tasks twisted and twisted until droplets of changed, even hateful, even hideous, beauty are squeezed out of bolts of cloth, ledgers, tailors’ dummies, pet birds, a row of shops, a puppy, a servant girl. As in Kafka, the malevolent is deadpan; its loveliness of form is what we notice. At the heart of the malevolent—also the repugnant, the pitiless—crouches the father: Schulz’s own father, since there is an inviolable autobiographical glaze that paints over every distortion. The father is a shopkeeper, the owner of a dry-goods store. He gets sick, gives up work, hangs around home, fiddles with his account books, grows morbid and sulky, has trouble with his bowels, bursts out into fits of rage. All this is novelist’s material, and we are made to understand it in the usual way of novels.
But parallel with it, engorging it, is a running flame of amazing imagery—altogether exact and meticulous—that alters everything. The wallpaper becomes a “pullulating jungle . . . filled with whispers, lisping and hissing.” Father “sitting clumsily on an enormous china chamberpot” turns into a prophet of “the terrible Demiurge,” howling with “the divine anger of saintly men.” Father shrinks, hides in closets, climbs the curtains and perches there like a baleful stuffed vulture, disappears “for many days into some distant corner of the house.” Schulz’s language is dense with disappearances, losses, metamorphoses. The dry-goods shop is flooded by a “cosmogony of cloth.” Crowded streets become “an ultra-barrel of myth.” The calendar takes on a thirteenth month. Rooms in houses are forgotten, misplaced. A bicycle ascends into the zodiac. Even death is somehow indefinite; a murk, a confusion. Father “could not merge with any reality and was therefore condemned to float eternally on the periphery of life, in half-real regions, on the margins of existence. He could not even earn an honest citizen’s death.” Father, alive, lectures on manikins: “There is no dead matter . . . lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life.” A dog represents “the most essential secret of life, reduced to this simple, handy, toy-like form.” Wallpapers become bored; furniture, “unstable, degenerate,” breaks out into rashes. The maid rules the master with ominous and magisterial positions of her fingers—she points, waggles, tickles. She is a kind of proto-Nazi. Father takes up ornithology and hatches a condor like “an emaciated ascetic, a Buddhist lama,” an idol, a mummy—it resembles father himself. (A fore-echo of Kosinski, another Pole obsessed by fearful birds.) Father loathes cockroaches, violently pursues them, and is transformed, undertaking at last their “ceremonial crawl.”
He lay on the floor naked, stained with black totem spots, the lines of his ribs heavily outlined, the fantastic structure of his anatomy visible through the skin; he lay on his face, in the grip of an obsession of loathing which dragged him into the abyss of its complex paths. He moved with the many-limbed, complicated movements of a strange ritual in which I recognized with horror an imitation of the ceremonial crawl of a cockroach.
In Kafka’s myth, it is the powerless son who turns into a cockroach; here it is the father who has lost control. Everything is loosened; it is not that the center does not hold; there never was a center. “Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.” “Our language has no definitions which would weigh, so to speak, the grade of reality.” Given these hints, it may be misleading to anticipate The Street of Crocodiles with so “normal” a signal as novel: it is a thick string of sights and sinuosities, a cascade of flashes, of extraordinary movements—a succession of what television has taught us to call “film clips,” images in magnetic batches, registered storms, each one shooting memories of itself into the lightnings of all the others. What is being invented in the very drone of our passive literary expectations is Religion—not the taming religion of theology and morality, but the brute splendors of rite, gesture, phantasmagoric transfiguration, sacrifice, elevation, degradation, mortification, repugnance, terror, cult. The religion of animism, in fact, where everything comes alive with an unpredictable and spiteful spirit-force, where even living tissue contains ghosts, where there is no pity.
Such metaphysical specters have their historical undersides. Home shifts, its forms are unreliable, demons rule. Why should these literary Jews of twentieth-century Slavic Europe—Babel, whose language was Russian, two years younger than Schulz; Kafka, who wrote in German, seven years older; Singer, a Yiddish writer, a dozen years younger; and finally (one is tempted to enter the next generation) the American Kosinski—why should these cultivated Slavic Jews run into the black crevices of nihilism, animalism, hollow riddle? Why, indeed, should these writers be the very ones almost to invent the literary signposts of such crevices? Gogol came first, it is true; but it is the Slavic Jews who have leaped into the fermenting vat. The homelessness and ultimate pariahship felt by Schulz—an assimilated, Polish-speaking Jew, not so much a Jew as a conscious Pole—in the years before the fiery consummation of the Final Solution may explain why the real Drogobych took on the symbolic name Crocodile Street, and became the place where “nothing ever succeeds . . . nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion.” But it did, in gunshot, on the streets of Drogobych in 1942. “Over the whole area,” Schulz writes of his visionary town, “there floats the lazy licentious smell of sin.”
The shock of Schulz’s images brings us the authentic bedevilment of the Europe we are heir to. Schulz’s life was cut short. His work, a small packet, reminds us of father: “the small shroud of his body and the handful of nonsensical oddities.” Some of the packet was lost in the human ash heap. As for the little that remains: let us set it beside Kafka and the others and see how it measures up for truth-telling.
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Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (Penguin Books, 1977).
Published in The New York Times Book Review, February 13, 1977.
Out of the Flames: The Recovery of Gertrud Kolmar
NOTE
Gertrud Kolmar, a reclusive German Jewish poet whose lonely and rigorous intensities have been compared to the crystal severities of Paul Celan and Nellie Sachs, was born in Berlin in 1894. The critic Walter Benjamin was her cousin. In 1940, having written in German all her life, she began to teach herself Hebrew; and by 1941, when she was seized for forced labor by the Nazis, she was already experimenting with poetry in Hebrew. She was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, at age forty-eight.
Out of the Flames: The Recovery of Gertrud Kolmar
Thus saith the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live . . . and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Then he said: . . . these bones are the whole house of Israel . . . Behold, O my people, I will open your
graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves . . . into the house of Israel.
EZEKIEL 37:9-12
A dream of reversal, of reconstruction: who has not, in the forty years since the European devastation, swum off into this dream? As if the reel of history—and who does not see history as tragic cinema?—could be run backward: these mounds of ash, shoes, teeth, bones, all lifted up, healed, flown speck after speck toward connection, toward flowering, grain on grain, bone on bone, every skull blooming into the quickness of a human face, every twisted shoe renewed on a vivid foot, every dry bone given again to greening life. Ezekiel’s vision in the valley of bones.
An imagining with the immensity of “an exceeding great army.” Who rises up, what? Populations; a people; a civilization. And everything unmade, undone, unwritten, unread. The children did not live to do their sums, the carpenters did not live to cut the doors to fit the houses that the architects and engineers left in midair, in midmind. Unwritten alphabets clog the breath of this dream like so many black hosts of random grit—letters still inchoate, not yet armied into poems, novels, philosophies. Torrents of black letters fill the sky of this imagining like a lost smoke. And singular voices, lost.
Every now and then, though, the dream becomes enfleshed: a voice comes up out of its grave, the living mind resumes its dialogue with history. Anne Frank, most famously; Emanuel Ringelblum’s Warsaw Ghetto diaries; Yitzhak Rudashevski’s Vilna Ghetto diaries, begun when he was fifteen. But these recovered voices yield direct records of the harrowings. Ezekiel’s vision wonders something else: how would the historian Ringelblum have written that history had that history not riven him? What would the mature Anne Frank’s novels—she would have become a novelist—have turned out to be?
The marvelous recovery of Gertrud Kolmar’s poetry signifies the redemption of just such a ripened art.
Gertrud Kolmar died in Auschwitz at age forty-eight; she was given time to become herself, though no time for her name to grow; until this moment, she must be considered unknown. She was published and reviewed barely eight weeks before Kristallnacht, that infamous country-wide pogrom called the Night of the Breaking Glass—after which her external precincts narrowed and narrowed toward death. Not so the open cage of her spirit: she felt herself “free in the midst of . . . subjugation.” A forced laborer in a Berlin factory, she continued to make poetry and fiction. Ghettoized in a tenement, she began to study Hebrew, and her last—lost—poems were written, most remarkably, defiantly, and symbolically, in the language of the house of Israel.
What has been recovered is not the record of the harrowings—though there is this besides—but the whole blazing body of her poetry, unconsumed. The American poet she is most likely to remind us of is Emily Dickinson—and not so much for her stoic singleness, the heroism of a loneliness teeming with phantasmagorical seeing, as for the daring pressure she puts on language in order to force a crack in the side of the planet, letting out strange figures and fires: she is a mythologist. To fathom this, one must turn finally to the Blake of the Four Zoas, or perhaps merely to German folklore: Kolmar too invents fables and their terrible new creatures, intent on tearing out of the earth of the Dark Continent of Europe its controlling demons.
How the devils cry, oh how the deserts cry!
On and on the furnaces of destruction burn; nothing can make them go out, as long as there are you and I to remember who lit them, and why. But now and then a congeries of letters plunges up out of the sparks to give us back a child; a man who meditates on Spinoza in the slave-factory (it was to him Gertrud Kolmar talked of freedom in subjugation); a woman who fabricated original powers in a life beaten out of isolation, sans event until the last cataclysm—and who flies up alive from the cataclysm on the sinewy flanks of these poems.
As if the ash were to speak:
Amazed, I clothe myself.
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Published as a Foreword to Dark Soliloquy: The Selected Poems of Gertrud Kolmar (The Seabury Press, A Continuum Book, 1975).
The Biological Premises of Our Sad Earth-Speck
We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow—sorrow in manifold shapes. We are denizens of an abundant, versatile, astonishing, beautiful, and unhappy planet—unhappy because the entitlement to life is the guarantor of death; unhappy because we are divided into tormentors and tormented.
Who assigned this division? Nature? To nature, looking dispassionately on the panther with its teeth in the breast of the ewe, the creature who is tormenting and the creature who is tormented are both innocent parties to a reasonable act. Prey is one possible design of life; perhaps on other planets, circling other stars, there are different schemes and contracts. But prey is ours: we are made according to the principle of hunger. On this planet, we feed.
All the wars that have to do with the claims and confusions of tribe and territory rest on this contract: they are wars of Feeding, and in that sense belong to the planet’s overall scheme. Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet’s chief source and cause of torment. Yet even here, all is congruent; there is no contradiction, no loose strand; though maimings and murders mount, Feeding is ultimately served; and, as long as our planet’s governing principle is salient, nothing is mysterious.
Nothing is mysterious, that is, until we come to what has been called Spirit. When Spirit enters, everything we have learned to think of as “nature” is routed, and all the planet’s rules appear to be contravened; then up rears monstrousness. Spirit—or Imagination, which means Image-making, which is to say Idolatry—puts gods into bizarre and surprising places: into stones, plain or hewn; into rivers and trees; into human babies born under significant stars; into tyrants; into kings or carpenters; into dry bread and wet wine. Into, in short, the familiar stuff and matter of the planet itself.
And when what is called Spirit introduces the idolatry of matter (nearly a tautology: Spirit always argues for the divinity of matter, and is, in fact, matter’s best advocate), the impulse for killing changes. Now, under Spirit’s reign, wars are grounded not in nature’s own scheme of prey, not, that is, in Feeding—Feeding, at least, while it may express itself in greed, is founded in need—but rather in some matter-centered ideal: such as those long-ago wars fought between the adherents of transubstantiation and the loyalists of insubstantiation, who argued over whether a piece of baked dough turned, when certain words were addressed to it, literally into God, or whether it only harbored God invisibly (as an iron, heated or cool, looks the same from the outside). Such wars cannot be “justified” by the ubiquitous law of Feeding. No law or scheme or principle or contract applies to the wars of Spirit. They are straight butchery.
It is only what is called Spirit—i.e., Idolatry—that produces this kind of butchery. Idolatrous killing does not come out of need, nor even out of greed; and it feeds no one and nothing: only matter itself. Idolatry can perceive only matter; its job is to transmute matter from one form into another form, and all for the sake of the adoration of matter itself; idolatry adores personifications and incarnations. Sometimes it puts God into the form of a man; sometimes, in its economy of hygiene, it suggests that a whole people personifies evil, or, rather, the evils that vermin breed. In either case it traffics, ultimately, in corpses. And whatever deals in corpses grows fond and fonder yet of torment.
Four decades ago the Jews of Europe were rounded up at various convenient points, and were compelled to stand naked, whole families together, at the edges of pits, hills, ravines, or graves they had dug themselves; then they were shot, and tumbled dead into the waiting void. When this proved to be inefficient (mere thousands could be dispatched by so technologically primitive a method), the remaining Jews of Europe—millions—were locked into freight cars, stacked standing together there like cordwood, some dying as they stood, the rest awash in a muck of excrement, urine, menstrual blood, and the blood of violence.
When the transport reached its destination, the Jews were herded into a nearby wood, stripped naked, and made to gallop into so-called shower chambers, where they were gassed by an effective insecticide. Then their corpses were burned in commodious and serviceable furnaces designed explicitly for this purpose. Specially selected properties of their corpses were transmuted into other matter: baled human hair for bolsters and pillows; gold teeth for the war effort; eyeglasses for recycling; artificial limbs for the value of their materials; and so on. (On one occasion a woman of artistic originality converted human skin into lampshades; but that is conceded as too frivolous a use of matter to serve as true idolatry.)
The advocates of Spirit who conceived, directed, and engaged in these transformations of one form of matter into another—living bodies into corpses, corpses into bone meal, and all in the course of less than an hour—were indeed recognizable as members of one of the civilized nations of the West; they were idolatrous Germans who had formulated an ideal of matter termed “race.” These Germans were not the only idolators of personification and incarnation: they were aided in their cult by thousands upon thousands of other Europeans, who, with the exception of the Danes, uniformly assisted in the roundup of the Jews. They were abetted also by the leadership of their enemies, all of them fully informed of the process of transmutation of Jews into bone meal, but reluctant to intercept it.
Now the planet whereon we live and die decrees the rule of prey (or, to say it plainly, the ingestion of one creature by another) for the benefit of the planet itself: that it may multiply in all its diversity and teem with ever-renewing plenitudes of kind and of form. In this scheme—salubrious for the species, melancholy for the individual—matter is continuously in a state of conversion from one form into another: this, as we have seen, we call hunger, and it is according to the planet’s nature.
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