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Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz
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Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, with Selected Prose, edited by Jerzy Ficowski (trans. Walter Arndt and Victoria Nelson) For Christmas last year a dear friend of mine gave me a copy of this wonderful book. I made my way through it very slowly, permitting myself to read only a page or two a day. Schulz was a prolific letter-writer, and many of his stories had their origin in the carefully crafted letters he wrote to other young literary artists. As Ficowski writes in his introduction: "With the aid of letters, Schulz was able to share his creative reflections and ideas, sometimes developing them in the process to full-fledged works of art... Through the agency of letters he lamented, over and over, the bouts of depression and barrenness that tormented him and sought to enlist confessors, companions, people to communicate with. Letters enabled him to populate the wasteland of his life without exposing himself to the personal contact that never failed to abash him." Unfortunately most of his letters were destroyed, devoured by the war. "For the ruin that overtook the letters," Ficowski goes on to say, "did not occur as it generally does when the passage of time depletes a hoard of documents but spares a great many--gradually, without erasing the tracks of the persons involved or vaporizing whole archives. Schulz's letters were destroyed as violently as their author and his correspondents..." With time permitting, I thought I might share some of my favourite passages from the letters (most of you know I'm big on passages). As it seems unlikely that his unfinished novel will ever materialise, I think I will have to learn to read Polish, and discover for myself his stories in their original language. So, to the first passage: Thanks for your prompt answer and kind words. When one has no self-assurance and faith oneself, someone else's is very welcome even if it doesn't quite replace one's own. What I lack is not so much faith in my own gifts but something more pervasive: trust in life, confident acquiescence in a personal destiny, faith in the ultimate benevolence of existence. -- To Romana Halpern [between 20 and 26 August, 1937] |
Re: Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz
I lead a life much below my level. Beyond the books, which trickle in slowly (I have to read what I can get, not what I have a mind to read), I have nothing to sustain my inner life; and everything around me exudes an indescribable prosiness, which presses down on me too with its brutal weight. Nothing on the order of a stroll with a dear person, not one hour of quiet and serene contemplation--all is tainted by mundane worry and staleness. I take it that productive creators fence themselves off from their environment by a certain regimen of living, a certain organization of their daily routine that does not allow the workaday banality, humdrum job, and the rest of it to get to them. I badly feel the lack of such a regimen, my incapacity to subject myself to such a discipline. One must, for instance, fence off one's inner life, not permit the vermin of ordinary cares to infest it. Some blindness used to protect me from this truth; I wore blinkers like a horse in harness. Now reality has won and penetrated my interior.
I will clearly have to think in earnest about safeguarding my private inner life and erecting fortifications in the shape of regular mental work. -- To Roma, October 29, 1938 |
Re: Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz
This support from people close to me cheers me in my state of depression. I am very downcast; I was not awarded the leave of absence I was so much counting on [Schulz was employed as a teacher of drawing and handicrafts in a provincial high school]. I'm still in Drohobycz, in the school where the gang will go right on playing fast and loose with my nerves. For you must realize that my nerves have been stretched thin like a net cast over the entire handicraft center, have crept along the floor, smothered the walls like tapestry and covered the shops and the smithy with a dense web. This phenomenon is known to science as telekinesis, which makes everything that happens in the shops, the planing shed, and so on seem to happen directly on my skin as well. This perfectly honed signaling system has clearly predestined me for the job of shop instructor.
As long as we're revealing irksome private maladies to each other, I'll let you in on a certain illness that troubles me, one that is also related to time but differs from your symptoms of gastric diarrhea you told me about. Your alimentary canal lets time pass through it too easily [Ha!], is incapable of retaining it. Mine is marked by a paradoxical fastidiousness: it is dominated by the fixed idea of a virginity of time. Just as for some rajah of melancholy and insatiable disposition any woman brushed by a male glance is already tainted and thereby unfit for anything but the silken noose, so for me any piece of time someone has lain claim to, has even casually mentioned in passing, is already marred, spoiled, unfit for consumption. I can't stand people laying claim to my time. They make the scrap they touched nauseating to me. I am incapable of sharing time, of feeding on somebody's leftovers. (These are the kind of words jealous lovers use.) When I am obliged to prepare a lecture for the next day or buy supplies in the lumberyard, I lose the whole afternoon and evening; I forfeit the rest with a grand gesture. All or nothing, that's my maxim. And since every school day gets profaned in this way, I live in proud abstinence and--do not write. Some sort of feudal mentality lives on in this unbending stance of mine. What do you think, can it be coaxed out, can this tiny sprig of gentryhood be consciously watered and cultivated? -- To Tadeusz Breza [Tadzio], 2 December, 1934 |
Re: Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz
My life is quite miserable just now, I am not writing at all. What buoys me up is the hope that maybe during the holidays I'll be able to spend a few weeks entirely alone--with no one but myself--though I'm not sure I'll be able to stand it alone with myself. I'd like to bury myself somewhere in total seclusion.
My book is due to come out in May; it gives me no joy but fills me instead with stagefright and misgivings. -- To Romana Halpern, 30 April, 1937 |
Re: Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz
It's good you brought Rilke to my mind. When creative reverses (which nobody else knows about) depress one, the mention of his name does one good. The presence of his books is a guarantee that the mute, convolute mass of what remains unformulated in us may yet reach the surface, miraculously sublimated. The precision and purity of Rilke's distillates are a cheering thing to us. My attempts to write are really agonizing. A writer (my type of writer, anyway) is the most wretched creature on earth. He has to lie incessantly, has to represent as valid and real what is actually in a miserable state of disintegration and chaos within him. The idea that I might mean to somebody what Rilke means to me strikes me as equally touching and humbling as it is undeserved. I am not taking it wholly seriously, either.
-- To Romana Halpern, 16 August, 1936 |
Re: Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz
I have come to see that my chronic depression derives from a quietist and eudaemonic* disposition, from spending every other mintute testing the balance of satisfaction in exploring the art of happiness. Every other minute I ask myself the question: Do I have the right to be satisfied, is the undertaking "Schulz" worth carrying on, does it justify further investment? And from the answer to this happiness questionnaire, I deduce a defeatist or optimistic attitude--mostly a defeatist one. Yet the question ought to be: Have I achieved the maximum of what was feasible in a given period? To build a life on work, on activity, declaring independence from the barometer of happiness--this is the right way to organize a life.
--To Andrzej Plesniewicz, 29 November, 1936 *eudaemonism: That system of ethics which finds the foundation of moral obligation in the tendency of actions to produce happiness. (OED) |
Re: Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz
I can't recall what I wrote you about in my last letter. My own diagnosis of my psychic state and inner situation changes constantly and takes on new shapes. It seems that the world, life, is always important to me solely as raw material for writing. The moment I cannot make creative use of life, it become either fearsome and perilous to me, or fatally tedious. To sustain curiosity, creative incentive, to fight the process of sterilization, boredom--these are my most important and urgent tasks. Without the zest this adds to life I would fall--alive--into a lethal lethargy. Literary art has accustomed me to its stimuli and sharp sensations. My nervous system has a delicacy and fastidiousness that are not up to the demands of a life not sanctioned by art. I am afraid this school year may kill me. When I had more youth and vitality I managed to tolerate it somehow. Now it makes my gorge rise. As an antidote to that oppressive school waltz, what about--debauchery? The thought has gone through my mind. But it threatens too much nervous shock and exhaustion (in the difficult and dangerous conditions I face here: small town... teacher). In order to write I need to have an especially benign and favorable climate around me--a good portion of belief in myself, quiet, security... I am now richer and more mature than when I wrote Cinnamon Shops. I lack only that naivete, that insouciance. Back then I felt no responsibility on my shoulders, no burden, I wrote for myself. That makes it much easier. I understand perfectly why someone like Berent [a short story writer and translator] reads no reviews of himself and avoids the press. He creates an artificial solitude around himself, an emptiness within which he works. That's what it takes. It is true that in Warsaw I wouldn't have this creative isolation. On the other hand, I wouldn't face death by tedium, creeping boredom, horrible vomiting fits from the drabness of life. After a certain time I would remove myself to a place of quiet to write. One can accuse me of many contradictions in what I say, but you will understand me if you put yourself in my situation mentally.
-- To Romana, 30 August 1937 |
Re: Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz
Thank you, Matthew. These excerpts are a wonderfully poignant glimpse into a creative mind wrestling with self-doubt.
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Re: Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz
I am coming to the conclusion that the prime cause of my depression is inactivity, unproductiveness. And the cause of my activity, in turn, is the mistaken idea that I am able to work only when everything is in good shape and I am content and have some peace of mind. The truth is that one has to make oneself work whatever one's mood is, make oneself independent of serenity and changeable moods; not ask for contentment, for happiness, but build one's life on work, effort, results. If I could bring this off, I would be happy.
-- To Romana, 29 November, 1936 |
Re: Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz
Do you know a good neurologist in Warsaw who might agree to treat me free of charge? I am definitely ill--completely distraught, onset of melancholia, despondency, sadness, a sense of inevitable disaster, irreparable loss... I ought to seek help. Yet I don't believe in doctors.
-- To Romana Halpern, June 1939 |
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