The Graveyard

INTRODUCTION BONEYARD SINGERS BY JAMES SALLIS

Forty years ago, while living in London, I was exposed daily, as editor and reviewer, to streams of literature in translation: Boris Vian novels, story collections from Central and South American writers, short-shorts and plays by Sławomir Mrożek, Penguin’s Writing Today and Modern European Poets series. In the last I came across a volume dedicated to Zbigniew Herbert’s work and, following it back to Polish Writing Today, recognized elements in contemporary Polish literature — a jaggedness and dislocation, a seepage of the absurd and alien into dailyness — that was very much to my taste. I think of these discoveries as a specific hunger: the tacit recognition of something, some essential nutrient, the individual needs.

Soon I was reading Tadeusz Różewicz (I am twenty-four / led to slaughter / I survived); learning about Aleksander Wat, to whom much later I would dedicate one of my poems; scouting out the early work of Jerzy Kosiński; curving my young spine over Czesław Miłosz; and sinking with great sighs and eurekas into the ever-amazing, encyclopedic work of Stanisław Lem.

And as any wanderer about the roads of modern Polish writing would, soon I happened upon Marek Hłasko.

Were this fiction, he would be leaning desultorily against a tree, smoking a cigarette with a noncommittal air, as I happened by. He would decline the ride I’d offer, saying that, at least for the moment, he isn’t headed that way, but might I by any chance — his eyes at last meeting mine — spare a few złoty?

In 1965, situated for the moment back at Maisons-Laffitte, a town in the northwest suburbs of Paris where Jerzy Giedroyc, publisher of the émigré journal Kultura, had an office, Hłasko recalled his first stopover there upon his arrival in the West seven years before — before he spun, grasping for handholds, out into the world.

In February 1958, I disembarked at Orly Airport from an airplane that had taken off in Warsaw. I had eight dollars on me. I was twenty-four years old. I was the author of a published volume of short stories and two books that had been refused publication. I was also the recipient of the Publishers’ Prize, which I’d received a few weeks before my departure from Warsaw … Disembarking from the plane at Orly Airport, I thought I’d be back in Warsaw in no more than a year. Today, I know I’ll never return to Poland.^*

Four years after writing those words, at age thirty-five and an exile for the past eleven years, Marek Hłasko was dead. He had overdosed on sleeping pills in Wiesbaden, Germany, on his way back to Israel from three years spent in the United States.

Paris, England, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, the United States, Israel. One measures a circle beginning anywhere. So the spin, the circles of Hłasko’s life, blurred watermarks on the well-used wood of a bar.

Marek Hłasko sprang into the spotlight, arms outstretched, with the publication of the story collection A First Step into the Clouds in 1956, followed fast by a novel, The Eighth Day of the Week. He had already gained fame for his short stories, for his literary and film criticism and, as editor, for turning the student weekly Po prostu into a national newspaper. Soon deemed Poland’s most popular contemporary writer, in 1957 he was awarded the State Publishers’ Literary Prize for the collection, while his novel put on the new skin of fifteen or more languages as well as an incarnation in film.

Then, within two years, Hłasko the darling, having brought out two novels abroad once Polish censors refused to pass them for publication, became Hłasko the despised.

“I was known as a finished man,” he wrote in Beautiful Twentysomethings, the memoir quoted above, while ensconced again at the home of Kultura, which had brought out those two controversial novels, “and it was taken as a given, beyond any doubt, that I’d never write again. As I said, I was twenty-four years old. Those who’d buried me so quickly with the skill of career gravediggers were older than me by thirty years or more.”

The brilliant young writer — onetime petty thief, onetime truck driver across treacherous mountain roads, onetime manual laborer and noncompliant spy on fellow workers, onetime journalist and editor, always a heavy drinker, always a mustang among saddle horses — becomes officially renegade. Attacked by the Polish press, and with permission to extend his visa refused, Hłasko makes the decision to remain abroad.

And so he wandered, so he spun out and sideways and back again. To Paris. To Switzerland. Giving interviews to the foreign press, cut off permanently from the world of Polish journalism and publishing. To West Germany. Working as a truck driver and manual laborer in Israel, where he wrote, in a two-year period, four extraordinary novels. To Spain and Denmark. Marrying, in 1962, Sonja Ziemann, who had played the leading role in the film version of The Eighth Day of the Week. Hanging with Polanski in Hollywood. Writing in 1969 his American novel, The Rice Burners.

Dying in Wiesbaden.

One of the novels that had been refused publication is the book you’re holding now. Other early work largely ignored the established, Communist order; characters were outsiders chiefly because of their dogged insistence in pursuing their individual lives behind the wall. The Graveyard drove headfirst into that wall. Thereafter, his characters would be not just outsiders but outcasts. With exile, Hłasko found his focus become at once tighter, in that he narrowed his observations to the fatally marginalized, the disavowed and dispossessed, and wider in that again and again he limned the question of how to live without faith, without belief. Agnieszka of The Eighth Day of the Week said it for them all: “The ideal is life without illusions.” Hłasko wrote of the people among whom he had earlier lived and worked, and of those whom he, while subsisting on menial labor, stubborn determination, and his wits, had encountered at the places he’d touched down.

The road that led me to literature was very different from the one followed by my fellow writers in Poland … I came to it from below. And when I began to write, I’d already seen so much that it was absolutely impossible for me to believe in official truth.^†

So, too, does violence push itself from the wings to center stage, pulling behind it, as on a chain, all manner of inauthenticity, deception, and dissembling. In Killing the Second Dog, a character looks “like an insect emerging into light for the first time from under an overturned stone.” One character declares: “My future? That’s a word I won’t be needing anymore.” Another: “There are no values left. That’s why no tragedy is possible today.” And if no tragedy, then what? Characters impersonate the cartoon character Goofy, take on the traits of movie types, spin duplicitous selves from spit, spite, and thin air — filling the void with whatever comes to hand.

Often Hłasko himself seems to be much like his characters, barely clinging to the edge of the world, to the edge of what he knows. Making his way not from streetlight to streetlight in the darkness but from stopgap to stopgap.

The Graveyard foreshadows much that was to come. The novel skirts the border of and plunges into the sinkholes of nihilism, a great zero burning at its heart: a circle around nothing. Yet it goes about its business subversively. Its surface bears up the simple tale of a man who loses all, a crooked retelling, really — Job and the Great Collective — while, just beneath, alligators glide and turn. Their eyes, their snouts are visible for moments, then are gone.

All begins simply enough. Out for a visit with a friend, Franciszek Kowalski becomes a bit drunk and, singing an old patriotic song on the way home, is stopped and questioned by police, grows indignant, and gets jailed overnight.

“A party member,” said the man in plain clothes, spreading his hands. “A former partisan, an officer, and — well? Just to look at you, Kowalski, one would say you’re decent, quiet, probably a good comrade. But when we probe deeper, we find an enemy. You’ve unmasked yourself, Kowalski …” He gave the pile of papers a push. “That’s the way it looks,” he said. “You’ve unmasked yourself, and that’s that.”

His military service, his years of faithful, productive work, his countless hours of party meetings, his constant aid and counsel to fellow workers — none of this matters now, in light of that one evening. The first unmasking leads to another and, once set in motion, cannot be undone. As Archibald MacLeish wrote in his retelling of the Job story: “Saw it start to, saw it had to. / Saw it.” Here, almost halfway through the novel, Kowalski goes for a walk along familiar streets.

From the dark streets the wind blew suddenly, picking up tatters of old posters and dragging them across the square. The second shift had begun; he could hear the roar of the engines, and the rattling and grinding of the machines. He passed the gate and walked out into the street; it ran far off into the darkness, and somewhere at the end of it drunks were staggering under the gas lamps, their shadows shrinking and crawling along the ground, or lengthening and sliding over the unlit windows of the houses. The sidewalk was wet and glassy. Franciszek looked down; in the puddles stars swam like fat worms.

People won’t go without an idea, one of Franciszek’s several confessors explains. Some new madman will always come along, grab hold of an icon, and run through the streets holding it aloft. The best revenge, he says, would be to create a new ideology. “To lead crowds to the sunny days of the future — that’s the biggest joke of all.”

A joke, or a lie? A question you well may ask yourself after reading The Graveyard and seeing what happens to poor, unsuspecting Franciszek Kowalski.

Friend and countryman Leopold Tyrmand said of Hłasko that he was “a man built of lies, some of them scurilous, some of them charming,” setting the small lies of himself and his books against what he saw as a sea of untruth around him. Marek Hłasko lived and wrote in the interstice between what we see in the world and what we make of it, in that narrow crawlspace between outside and inside, self and world, where we all take up temporary habitation, never settlers, forever squatters.

^* Quotations in this essay from Hłasko’s memoir, Beautiful Twentysomethings, are taken from the Northern Illinois University Press edition (2013), translated by Ross Ufberg.

^† From a 1958 interview, translated by Thompson Bradley, with the magazine L’Express.