Biography: In 1933, T.S. Eliot remarked in passing that "reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable" if one wishes to develop a tradition. He was explaining what he called "a primer of modern heresy", and the main culprits were D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and the Romantic poets, among others.
His accusation was that the visions to be found in these writers' works were not supported by any institutional belief - be it of a church or other organization. It is difficult for us to take this criticism seriously today (or in Eliot's time for that matter), for we have no orthodoxy, and without an orthodoxy, how can there be heresy?
Bruno Schulz published his début, Cinnamon Shops, in 1934, and that book suggests that while the memory of orthodoxy remains, it is just about possible to be heretic - or, as Jerzy Ficowski has it, Schulz inhabited the "regions of the great heresy". Certainly, he was a free-thinking Jew, it was only his murder by Germans in 1942 that branded him simply "Jewish".
Ficowski's book has itself been published with the support of the Jewish Heritage Project's International Initiative in the Literature of the Holocaust. One bridles slightly at the idea that Schulz's work might be considered "Literature of the Holocaust" - nothing could be further from the truth - but then is grateful that this organization has helped publish a book in English that provides valuable background to one of the most elusive, important and magical writers that Poland can boast of in the 20th century.
Schulz's materials and themes promise nothing extraordinary: childhood and more generally life in the small town of Drohobycz (now in the Ukraine but once part of the Hapsburg empire). The streets of the town, family members, the billowing nuances of seasons and flora are described with invention and accuracy, but that too is nothing extraordinary. Rather, it is the impression that all these things float gently over an abyss, an abyss that is only occasionally and undramatically glimpsed behind the fold of a tablecloth or the face of a dissolute uncle that is the most forceful aspect of his brief fictions.
The father, ubiquitous in Schulz's fiction, expresses his frustration with God's creativity. He holds that we have all lived too long under the terror of his perfection, and it is time for us to assert our own creativity. What does it matter if our creations can only walk for a day, are one-dimensional, and then fade quickly into oblivion? He presents this argument while cowering masochistically beneath the lissom, exposed legs of three young women. They only have to curl a finger in the air or shift their legs an inch in order to master him completely. Schulz figures the gulf streams of desire and power that flow and swerve through the room with scientific attention. If Schulz is a heretic, then it is because it is hard to imagine any orthodoxy that would patch over the chasms that he catches sight of.
Jerzy Ficowski's book is an assortment of biographical sketches, letters, literary criticism, with a chronology tacked on at the end. It is more hagiography than biography - in Ficowski's eyes, Schulz resembles a saint for his humility and for the extraordinary nature of his visions. Ficowski has taken pains over long years to gather fugitive materials (paintings as well as writings) about this Polish writer, and without his devotion, we would know considerably less. For this we can only be grateful.
Among other things, his account of the origin of Cinnamon Shops is enthralling. The short tales were composed as postscripts to letters to Debora Vogel, a woman he admired. She arranged for Schulz to make the trip to Warsaw so that he could give the manuscript to a senior Polish writer. Schulz arrived in the morning, insisting that he had to catch his train in the evening. A friend of Vogel's coaxed Zofia Nalkowska into reading the book that afternoon.
Schulz got a taxi to Nalkowska's, and then returned to wait it out. The phone-call came six hours later: "This is the most sensational discovery in our literature!" For the self-taught writer who matured far from the mainstream of literary culture and was known only as a humble and half-qualified art teacher, this was the springboard to literary fame.
Given the intensely private origins of his prose in those post-scripts, it is not surprising that Schulz found it difficult to adjust to the fact that he now had a large audience, and his second book, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), is not as strong as the first. Ficowski still holds out hope for the discovery of the manuscript of a novel entitled Messiah, which Schulz was working on when he was killed.
Schulz has been influential for writers as various as Bohumil Hrabal, Philip Roth, Danilo Kis, and Cynthia Ozick. Hrabal was once asked where he would like to live and he answered immediately, Drohobycz: "In fact, I moved to that town and have been living there ever since I read Cinnamon Shops".
Schulz no doubt would not like the crowds of new arrivals, but the pleasures of his prose will be drawing them for a long time to come.
Justin Quinn works at the Charles University, Prague. His collection of poems, Fuselage, was published last year by Gallery.
Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, A Biographical
Portrait. By Jerzy Ficowski. Translated and edited by Theodosia Robertson.
W.W. Norton & Co, 255pp. $25.95