Diary, Volume Three
By Witold Gombrowicz
Translated by Lillian Valle
Northwestern University Press, 215 pages, $29.95, $12.95 paper
In August 1939, the Polish novelist and playwright Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69) sailed as a journalist on the maiden voyage of a Polish luxury liner bound for Argentina. Stranded in Buenos Aires by the outbreak of war in Europe, he lived there obscurely for a quarter of a century.
The diary he began in 1953 and concluded in 1967 is one of the shining contributions to the literature of exile and homelessness in our century. This ghost-survivor from a war-changed world was almost unknown in Polish emigre circles until the early 1950s and not published in Poland until 1957. In 1963, the Ford Foundation invited him to Berlin; he remained in Europe until his death.
Gombrowicz’s diary (this volume covers 1961-66) is the record of a profound inner life marked by little outward drama. He was a man to whom “nothing happened,” escaping the horror of war at home and living a modest bachelor’s life in Buenos Aires and the provinces. But possessed of a rare literary imagination, this solitary man probed the condition of Western civilization from one of its Latin borderlands.
Of particular concern to him as one whose work seemed almost buried by history was the meretricious culture industry of modern mass society, where everybody wanted to get into the act-as professors, writers, artists and pundits. Gombrowicz’s peripheral life also allowed him to consider from a distance the postwar struggle of his native land to re-establish some sense of national identity.
He was repulsed by the Polish intellectuals who sought to ape the West. Their true strength lay, he believed, in a blessed “stupidity” that refused to keep step with the maunderings of “high culture.” “I would listen to a Polish voice in Europe with great pleasure,” he notes in 1962, “saying to the intellect: enough, I don’t understand you, I can’t, I don’t want to.”
Though Gombrowicz’s was every inch the critical mind, he liked to think that his impatience with philosophy-including the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he brilliantly criticized-sprang from his roots in Poland’s old landholding class. Intellectuals lived, he thought, too much in the clouds, needing the pain of the world’s resistance to temper their dreamy excesses. Recognizing the tendency of all thought and of human society itself to seek permanence and finality, he felt that such rigidity must be resisted. Play, wit and irreverence, therefore, mark his work in all its varieties.
But there is no final escape from the fate of form, for Gombrowicz understood intuitively the point so belabored by Sartre-that all human interchange entails the shaping and defining of one person by others. To be for and unto oneself, then, is a Herculean task, an endless search for authenticity in self-renewal.
That is why the diary is so congenial for him. Its agile, essayistic approach to life perfectly suits his alert, “uncompleted” mind. In these pages, he is a bird poised for flight, a juggler, a scapegrace and a holy fool all at once.
Gombrowicz is a passionate debunker, but his most moving voice is elegiac, exemplified when his departure from Argentina calls forth a storm of confused feelings. Who has he been all this while? What did it mean? Whence is he bound? Such questions assail him as he embraces friends, drinks toasts and is hailed on his way.
Later, restless and ill-adjusted in Berlin, he tries to fathom the fact that Argentina has been his life. After Berlin, in the unwonted comfort of the French Riviera, he reflects, “There, beyond the ocean, even my memory is undergoing disintegration, is dying.”
These reflections arise from a reading of Dante, who, separated from Gombrowicz by 600 years and endless waves of the dead, seems impossibly distant, even “crude, mean, boring and inferior! . . . That `Divine Comedy’ doesn’t amount to a hill of beans!”
Only, he discovers, by acknowledging the pain at the core of Dante’s vision of life can he feel he has reached across the distance between himself and the Italian poet. This effort to connect with the raw power, even the repulsive strangeness, of the “Comedy” typifies Gombrowicz’s view of history: “Communion with the past is . . . a continual laboring to attain it, to summon it into being.”
As if admitting we must lose the struggle, the diary gives an unremitting record of unhousement, wandering, loss. In the closing pages, Gombrowicz’s return to a sea-changed postwar Europe leaves him adrift. Berlin seems too prosperous to trust: under the gloss of its material triumph he senses buried demons.
The adversity of exile taught Gombrowicz that consciousness entails pain, and living, risk. It gave him, too, the power to quicken our appetite for life and, in the phrase of his translator, make our human identity seem “a more expansive, spacious, freer place.”
