Killing the Second Dog

Introduction

WHEN THE POLISH-BORN WRITER MAREK HLASKO’S FIRST SHORT novel was published in 1957 he seemed to spring from nowhere. The post-war order, particularly in communist Poland, was a painful and bewildering experience for the rising adult generation. Suddenly the gutsy, pared-down, and hardly optimistic narrative of his debut novel Eighth Day of the Week expressed what young people felt, and how they saw their defeated, deadbeat elders. Hlasko often hinted that he never meant to be a writer, and yet, from the other side of Europe, he fit Jean-Paul Sartre’s definition of contemporary style almost exactly. For the French philosopher the literary scene was now markedly under the influence of “the American writers, Kafka and Camus.” Hlasko wrote in this contemporary style seemingly without trying. How he found overnight success in Poland and then worldwide is a remarkable and tragic story.

He was born in Warsaw in 1934. His father was a lawyer and his mother had artistic leanings. They divorced when Hlasko was three and in 1939, just a couple of weeks into the Second World War, his father died. In Killing the Second Dog the protagonist calls his father gentle and good and notes that he was killed fighting the Germans. Perhaps we can take that as an indication. Certainly it’s the nearest to an autobiographical account we have. Hlasko’s mother ran a grocery stall in the capital during the Nazi occupation, but when the 1944 Warsaw Uprising failed, she and her son fled, along with thousands of others, to safer parts of the country. In his 1966 autobiography, Beautiful Twentysomethings, Marek remembered, aged ten, starting a new life in Czestochowa, southwest Poland. Shortly afterwards his mother remarried, and the family moved to Wroclaw, the nearest larger city. Thanks in part to his mother urging the poets upon him, the boy excelled in composition, but otherwise his school career was stormy. Several times expelled for aggressive behavior, he had his first taste of manual work at age thirteen. At sixteen he was a truck driver, an experience which formed the basis for a hair-raising account of real working conditions under post-war communism, Next Stop Paradise, written some years later.

A brief return to formal education was formative. In Wroclaw around the age of fifteen Hlasko attended the Vocational Theater School. Courses intended to turn out back-stage professionals introduced him to dramatic writing, and gave him contact with film and filmmakers. He began to read, not least the great playwrights, and to write. Meanwhile on the strength of his laboring background in 1951 the Communist Party newspaper Tribuna Ludu hired him as a “people’s reporter.” The task in communist days for all writers was to deliver a glowing account of working-class valor and virtue, but when Hlasko’s first stories appeared in 1954 they portrayed disillusioned, drink-sodden, malicious lives. Here was a world in which youthful idealism was soon shattered. After Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died in 1953, the whole East Bloc heaved a sigh of relief that the bitter truths of everyday life could once again be told, although the message took a while to filter through to cautious cultural bureaucrats. When in 1956 the new Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev openly denounced his predecessor, that was the first intentional signal of a great easing-up. Hlasko’s debut collection of stories First Step in the Clouds appeared. And yet, by 1957, when that collection won the prestigious Publishers’ Prize, the ideological chill was back. The frankness of Eighth Day of the Week became was an embarrassment and work on turning it into a film was abruptly curtailed, pending radical changes.

Perhaps no writer from those times in any East Bloc country has left such a detailed account, in his autobiography and scattered through Killing the Second Dog, of what that swift change in 1957-58 meant to a young writer who was lionized and ostracized in quick succession. Hlasko’s headstrong and vulnerable character, and a proud belief in his work, put him on a collision course from which he was never able to recover.

When a decade later Hlasko’s work began to appear in English, foreign critics pounced on a writer who with his matinee good looks resembled James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause and sounded like one of Britain’s Angry Young Men, impatient with lack of opportunity in a stultified class society after the war. But because of what he had witnessed under the Nazi occupation, and what communism brought to Poland, Hlasko was a rebel, and a writer, of quite a different order, one whom non-Polish readers perhaps can only begin to understand with hindsight.

The ideological upheaval of 1958 meant that Poland’s submission at the Cannes Film Festival was canceled. It was to have been the film version of The Eighth Day. While a toned-down version eventually materialized, Hlasko was bitterly disappointed. Meanwhile Polish publishers rejected his two latest fictions, Next Stop Paradise and The Graveyard. A state-sponsored writers’ visit to France, intended to make Polish names better known in the West, did go ahead, and Hlasko took part, with, amongst others, the poet and future Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska. But quietly at this point the state seems to have decided to cut its ties with Hlasko. He was allowed to leave the country, but without the funds he needed to live on in Paris. In those Cold War days when an official patriotism was required of every citizen, Poland had a reason for not wanting back this novelist who wrote of life there as grim and cheap. When he secured a French publisher for his rejected titles he gave them an even better one, in those crazily ideological days: an apparent lack of patriotism.

Hlasko decided to put a positive spin on his precarious situation by visiting America, but with his passport about to run out he didn’t qualify for a visa. Three years followed in which the communist Polish state played cat and mouse with the young man’s deep emotional need to return home. They make heartrending reading in Beautiful Twentysomethings and again in Killing the Second Dog.

The unrenewed passport, exchanged for the papers of a refugee, allowed Hlasko to travel in France, West Germany and Italy. In 1959 he married the German actress Sonia Ziemann who had played the female lead in Eighth Day of the Week, and they lived for a time in Munich. Photographs of that marriage — and images are all we have to go on — show an attractive happy couple. Sonia liked to drive fast and Marek obliged with the car she bought him. But later in 1959 Hlasko was already alone in Israel, ostensibly invited by friends, actually looking, illegally, for work.

In Israel he hoped those friends could help him. Polish Jews who had fled anti-Semitism, German Jews who had survived the war, and Jews already born in Israel, were now his compatriots and his “family.” In All Backs Were Turned, set in 1961, at a time when in Europe the Berlin Wall was going up, and in Killing the Second Dog, Hlasko would vividly evoke the tough, brazen, deeply unfriendly Israeli milieu in which he found himself. In staggering heat he was forced for a while to work in a blast furnace. When his wife came to find him someone stole the razor and towel that were his only possessions, as he turned his attention away from his place on the beach. The style of his Israeli novels, written between 1961 and 1966, seemed to combine hardboiled American crime with biblical simplicity. Killing mentions St. Paul and Mickey Spillane almost in the same breath. Perhaps Hlasko felt some affinity with a persecuted people starting afresh in a new homeland. The condition of a relatively new Israel was a replica on a grand scale of his own disturbed life. But he made clear his feeling that so many millions, not only Jews, had suffered. In the four short novels and several short stories he set in Israel it was not hope for one people, but the impossibility of human goodness as such, which obsessed him.

In Czestochowa in 1945 he witnessed the arrival of the Red Army to “liberate” the city. Terrible memories from that time come back to haunt the protagonist of Killing the Second Dog. In his autobiography Hlasko remembered the woman who tried to avoid being raped by addressing the commandant in Russian and welcoming him with a shot of vodka. The glass was trampled underfoot. The Russian spoken by soldiers violating a man’s wife came back verbatim: “Don’t worry, we’ll just give her a little poke and then it’s over.” These nightmares merged with bad conscience at what the penniless immigrant without work was forced to do to survive in Israel. There is poignant moral desperation in Hlasko, as readers of Killing the Second Dog will find.

A photograph of Hlasko still in Israel after two years shows him bitter and worn-down at not yet thirty. From Israel where he labored in Tel Aviv, Eilat and Jaffa, he begged the Polish authorities to allow him home. Like the protagonist of The Graveyard, and implicitly like Kafka’s Josef K, Hlasko would have been content to be judged, rather than left to wander in a living hell of absurdity and exclusion.

One feature of his writing is a contempt for religious and ideological convictions acquired, as it were, without thinking. His communist experience made him despise men and women willing to “learn how to think.” The Graveyard studied with a pity rare in Hlasko the downfall of an official on whom the system suddenly turns, when before he had embodied that system. It was a tale which Hlasko knew bore obvious comparison with Arthur Koestler’s far better-known Darkness at Noon.

Not ideology but the simple terrible business of how people live together hovers over the unhappy stories Hlasko tells us. In communist Poland lives were uncomfortable, downtrodden and merciless, a cruelty exacerbated by the biting cold of winter, although occasionally, for moments, the misery was redeemed by the beauty of the mountains. In Israel it was the heat, unbearable for European immigrants, and the maddening dry wind, that enveloped his characters in existential languor. The seaside settings for Killing and All Backs Were Turned have to remind us of Meursault, Camus’s anti-hero in The Outsider, blinded by heat and light just before he shoots dead an innocent man on an Algiers beach. Civilized life struggles to come to terms with Meursault’s motivation, or lack of it. In one of its aspects Killing the Second Dog presents a kind of absurdist tableau to a sympathetic American visitor, to win her sympathy. Perhaps the last possible way to trump the malign world is to take the absurdity of evil to new heights. Over and over situations arise in Hlasko in which characters must undermine and destroy their neighbors, or succumb themselves. Love and lust, indecipherable the one from the other, and the need to survive, drive them on. Alcohol, sleeping pills and amphetamines, and an addiction to brawling, help one day turn into the next.

All the parallels suggested by Sartre’s insightful definition of the post-war novel can be followed up in Hlasko’s case. Like most dissenting writers in the communist era, he was well aware that Kafka had gone before him in capturing the absurdity of the system which gave no answers and provided no entrances and exits to the mystery it seemed to enshrine. It’s possible Hlasko never read Camus, but he must strike us as an existentialist writer out of sheer personal experience of being a radical outsider. In his readiness to fight back on the page against a raw deal from life he also found natural brothers-in-arms in the American writers, though no specific one comes to mind. He gives the impression of having read pulp fiction rather than Faulkner. Moreover, although early critics mentioned Hemingway, that connection seems misleading, for certainly Hlasko’s world is macho, but it is hardly crowned by honor.

The plot of Killing the Second Dog is fraud. Two penniless immigrants defraud wealthy American women visiting post-war Israel. The ruthless Robert is the brains behind the scam, and Jacob, one of Hlasko’s alter egos, is the means. The scheme plays on this other-Hlasko’s good looks and his ability to learn a part. He tells these women what they want to hear. Robert in his previous life produced Shakespeare. Now he scripts scams featuring his hunky friend.

As scene follows scene, Killing the Second Dog, a picaresque tale of how the scheme doesn’t follow the plan, derives its depth from an almost comic unwillingness to concede some genuine human emotions. The pseudo-romantic hero Jacob is at once a puppet, where he should be a human being, and a kind of Macbeth, being urged on by the ruthless Robert to do the deed, which he both does and does not.

In fact all of Hlasko’s themes, bar the Israeli setting, were already evident in his first work. They include a general distrust of women and a tendency to see them as either whores or, occasionally, angels. The sex in Hlasko is mostly prostituted. Sex, in the tainted reality that destroyed a young couple’s happiness in First Step in the Clouds, has become for men and women equally just another means to survival. Male companionship, the redeeming feature of Next Stop Paradise, returns in Killing as a something-better-than-nothing, a joint conniving, a physical dislike, but still better than being alone. Telling his unfortunate tales Hlasko excels at the one-line putdown, the witty repartee. He also memorably evokes natural forces as the backdrop to the human drama. Darkness is one theme in Killing. Under its unfriendly spread, the two conspirators seem to be in a tussle with the universe. The power of the sea to create a narcotic oblivion is another. “No wise-ass bastard can change that, or try to; that’s what felt so good about looking at the sea.”

The dog in Killing the Second Dog is part of the absurd show the fraudsters put on to woo their victim. Hlasko gave some half-convincing answers to curious critics at the time, including that he had once seen a Nazi shoot a dog. But in a more satisfying hermeneutic reading of the text the dog stands in for the unnamed protagonist who sacrifices the best part of himself to pull off a mean trick. Robert and partner buy only purebred, “film star” dogs, whose food costs them far more than what they spend on themselves. “The dog has to be big, happy and full of life. It’s got to be loved and pampered by everybody.” The gorgeous dog, whom other characters quickly love, becomes then one more pawn to manipulate in the game.

Another account of the dog suggests itself. Could it be that Hlasko, who assimilated biblical stories in his childhood, and had his alter ego explain himself as a Catholic in Killing, knew the story of Tobias and the Angel? The only dog mentioned in the entire Bible accompanies the Angel who in turn accompanies Tobias on a long journey to recover his father’s money. A trusted third party is keeping it safe. “Tobias and the Angel,” in which two men set out with a dog, is a story of decency and love from start to finish, the very opposite of the world Marek Hlasko encountered.

Yet another interesting character in Killing is the child, Johnny, a tough guy and a troublemaker suffering from not having a father. In his relationship with the hunky con-man from Poland we can see Hlasko the child meeting Hlasko the man. The submerged moral themes make Killing worth several readings. When the narrative ends with a cry for the possibility of goodness in a man’s life, it is a moment for the reader to reflect on that other great influence on Hlasko’s moral outlook, Dostoevsky.

After leaving Sonia Ziemann — whom uncharitably he called naïve, but of whom he also wrote that he did not want to spoil her life — a second time, Hlasko unsuccessfully tried to kill himself in Munich. Pages of his autobiography, written after he recovered from this suicide attempt, are devoted to a sarcastic account of the interview he has with a German doctor, in which he tries to tell him that the memory of what happened — with the Nazis, with the Red Army — just won’t leave him.

In 1966 some promise appeared on the horizon. His old friend from Warsaw, Roman Polanski, now a successful film director in America, invited him across the Atlantic. Polanski, already famous for Knife in the Water, was beginning to work on Rosemary’s Baby. With access to Hollywood and a new circle of Polish-speaking friends Hlasko had his best chance yet to start again. He was of the same traumatized generation as Polanski, who though he was born in France had grown up in Poland from the age of three and survived the Holocaust there. Both of Polanski’s Jewish parents had died in Nazi death camps. In Knife in the Water one can see perhaps that sense of life as a barely concealed existential duel, between one man and another, over who has the possessions and the power; and where, differently, happiness might lie. A special joy for Hlasko was his friendship with the composer Krzysztof Komeda, who had written the music for Knife in the Water and was a key member of Polanski’s team. Yet it seems that Hlasko, by the time he reached America, was emotionally so extremely fragile, the result of all he had seen in wartime Poland, and all that happened to him after, that even in happier circumstances he could barely cope without alcohol.

One night he and Komeda were so drunk that Komeda fell into a ditch and cut his head open. Trying to help him Hlasko himself fell and may have worsened the injury. Komeda recovered, only to succumb to a blood clot on the brain five months later. Apparently, this was the last loss Hlasko could endure. Perhaps with his grief compounded by guilt, he killed himself in June 1969 with an overdose of pills in a hotel in Wiesbaden, at last enacting for real the suicides his alter ego had faked in the fraud plots of Killing, and making up for the Munich failure six years earlier. He had been on his way back to Israel via West Germany, shuttling between countries. He was, aged 35, a man without friends, without money, without a home. Life was unbearable.

The world lost Marek Hlasko early. Polanski, the same generation and long since an international figure, and Marek Nowakowski, the comparatively obscure prose writer who remained in Poland and managed to write through the communist era despite the hurdles put his way, are, for the sake of comparison, still alive. Hlasko became so famous in such a short time, and yet nothing could compensate for the damage life did to him. He was a child and a young man in an age which had almost abandoned humanity. The feelings of displacement and loss were overwhelming.

Hlasko was first translated into English in the late 1950s, reflecting the West’s eventual reception of works published during the East Bloc thaw that followed Stalin’s death, and again in the early 1990s, after communism collapsed and the world had free access once more to cultures that had been locked away behind the Iron Curtain. After two cycles of interest in his work the latest rediscovery of him simply reflects the unique quality of his prose. In tune with the writerly spirit of the times that Sartre identified, Marek Hlasko created an anguished post-war literature all his own.

Lesley Chamberlain