Tag: Poland

Two “Losers” – Bellow’s Seize the Day and Eisenberg’s A Real Pain

Recently, I happened to read a novel about one loser and shortly afterwards watch a movie about another. In Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, we have one day in the life of a man, friendless and in crisis. Meanwhile, in Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 film A Real Pain the focus is on two brothers on a memory tour of Poland, both of whom are in their own ways losers. What is interesting, in both works, is the way the stories frame their losers. In both, but in different ways, we are made to challenge and ultimately modify our understanding of how these characters really live, and who among them really deserves to be called a loser.

Saul Bellow’s short novel Seize the Day is the second of the writer’s works which I have read, after Herzog. It follows Tommy Wilhelm at the height of his midlife crisis (wife gone, job gone, money gone, aging tyrant father decidedly not gone) as everything comes together to slap him spectacularly in the face one fine day in 1950s Manhattan. Wilhelm is gullible, innocent, naïve, and totally incompatible with his world.

We can contrast Wilhelm with Benji Kaplan, from Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 film A Real Pain. Also innocent, also emotional, also Jewish, the key difference between the portrayals of him and Bellow’s hero is the worlds these luckless figures wander in. In Eisenberg’s film, Benji and his brother David are on a Holocaust tour in Poland. Where Tommy’s environment conspired to crush him, Benji’s encourages us to view him more positively – at least at first – as he charms the viewer and other characters with his positive, can-do attitude.

Seize the Day

Tommy Wilhelm is a loser. “The type that loses the girl”, he is told by a potential movie agent, he has signed over control of his last few hundred dollars to a charlatan to invest in lard, and he has lost his wife and children and his work. The reasons for this are not too complicated. The man is delusional, naïve, childish. When a sprinkle of nepotism means he needs to share his job with a director’s relative, Wilhelm resigns without a backup plan. When his wife demands he pay huge amounts of money for maintenance without letting him get a divorce, he just reaches for his chequebook. When Dr Tamkin, a (quack) psychiatrist, tells him to sign over his money to him to invest for a huge return, of course he does that too. He is “a man who reflected long and then made the decision he had rejected twenty separate times.”

The narration of Seize the Day reflects Wilhelm’s own failure and hardly ever seems willing to give him a break. Listen to the brilliant opening:

“When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought, and there was a certain amount of evidence to back him up. He had once been an actor – no, not quite, an extra – and he knew what acting should be. Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels. He came from the twenty-third floor down to the lobby on the mezzanine to collect his mail before breakfast and he believed – he hoped – that he looked passably well: doing all right. It was a matter of sheer hope, because there was not much that he could add to his present effort.”

Whenever we have a statement, we backtrack. “No, not quite”, “he hoped”, “so at least he thought.” Here is a narration that is hostile to Wilhelm’s delusions and never lets them stay for long. It laughs at poor Tommy by refusing to do him the littlest courtesy – that of letting him off the hook for being wrong by not mentioning it. At one point later in the book he has a disastrous phone call and gets so upset he flees the booth, but not before the narrator can step in to tell us how he left most of his remaining coinage just sitting there on the side.

The narration seems cruel, but quite quickly we see that it’s also the whole world around Wilhelm that is cruel. During the novel, Wilhelm is staying in the same hotel as his father. This man, in his eighties, seems to have chosen a form of existence similar to dried meat – by removing all moisture, or in his case kindness, from himself he has prolonged his own life. Wilhelm desperately needs his father’s financial support, or even emotional support. Instead, the man is all rugged individualism – “carry nobody on your back.” Not even, as it turns out, your own children. Besides the father, there’s Wilhelm’s wife, and Dr Tamkin, who eventually absconds with all the money Wilhelm has left.

Central to the novel is the idea of the market, where Wilhelm gambles away his savings on lard futures. It is here that Wilhelm is a loser in the purest sense – in a game of luck, he has none of it. But the market also represents that unkind, cold world. Its movements are, to Wilhelm, utterly unpredictable. It seems also to be connected to violence – Mr Rappaport, one of the characters there, has made his fortune slaughtering chickens – and, furthermore, it is totally inescapable. The market creeps into the language of the book, with money as a proxy for status (one of the only times Wilhelm’s father seems a little uncomfortable is when he has to lie about Wilhelm’s employment history to big him up), but it goes further than that. We read that Wilhelm has failed at the “business of life”. Regardless of whether you place the emphasis in that phrase on the first or third word, it’s true. But we might also add that if life itself is a “business”, then there’s no way ever to escape the market – it truly is all-pervasive.

Everyone laughs at the loser Wilhelm, so obviously unsuitable for the world. Those laughing includes the reader too, for Seize the Day is a hugely funny book. But then, some two thirds of the way through the book and just as the humiliations are piling up so high we almost can’t see over the top of them, something shifts and the narration begins to change. A few days earlier, we learn, Wilhelm had a kind of revelation, one of those “subway things”: “a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast.” It doesn’t last, but he remembers it. Just like he remembers God, who lurks in prayers at the ends of chapters when things are really bad. The revelation connects Wilhelm to something authentic and higher, which nobody else in the book has any knowledge of.

Wilhelm is flawed and deluded, but so is everyone else. His father rejects him, his wife rejects him, his trusted investment partner runs with the money. All of these people choose to disconnect and trap themselves within their own sensibilities. But only Wilhelm connects with others through his heart, however briefly. It is he who ends the book sobbing over a stranger’s body, something it is impossible to imagine any other character doing. For that, he appears more noble, even if it comes as his abjection reaches its peak, than all the rest.

A Real Pain

In A Real Pain, through the cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David Kaplan (Eisenberg himself), we have another treatment of the idea of a loser, or failure in life. In the movie, the cousins come together to go on a tour of Poland’s Jewish legacy using some money left by their grandmother Dory after her death. Where Wilhelm is alone and competing against an ideal and successful version of himself, the central dynamic in A Real Pain is the real comparison between the two cousins. David is married, with a child and a high-paying job. (Albeit one – working with advertising banners – which Benji is quick to dismiss.) In comparison, Benji is emotionally variable, pot-smoking, and not quite employed.

Of the two, Benji is the obvious loser, with David the sensible family man. Money is less important than in Seize the Day, but it’s still there – Benji is a failure because he cannot hold down a job, David a success because he has a good one. The conversation where Benji dismisses David’s occupation is one of the film’s first ones, just as the one where Benji talks about his future employment without reference to anything more concrete than helping out a friend is one of the film’s last ones.

With the two men this idea of “loser” is questioned almost immediately in a way that it never is in Bellow’s novel. At one of the first scenes in Poland, at a memorial to the Warsaw Uprising, Benji runs and poses next to the sculptures in a way that David considers disrespectful and hence cannot fathom doing himself. Yet with his positive attitude and ebullient personality, Benji persuades the other guests on the tour to join him in a little reenactment, with David left – alone – holding the camera. If Benji is a loser, this is a strange idea of one. It is serious, dorky, David, who is left out.

This line of argument – that the intellectually or financially less blessed may yet be talented or wonderful in their own way – is not new. But rather than labouring it, A Real Pain takes the topic in another direction. Much like Wilhelm, in a number of incidents Benji appears naïve, inarticulate, emotional. When the tour travels to Lublin he complains about them being in a first-class coach, when fewer than a hundred years ago people like them would be herded like cattle into the train’s rear compartments and sent to their deaths. Then, at a cemetery, he complains to the guide that he doesn’t want to hear any facts and that instead they should be silent. He feels strongly, but his delivery turns the others in the group a little against him. At a dinner where he once again unnerves everyone before leaving to the bathroom, David confesses that Benji had tried to end his own life only a few months before – further evidence that his charm is only one side of a more complex and tragic figure.

A Real Pain is not ultimately Benji’s story. Like Wilhelm, he rages, he shows his positive sides, but by the end of the film he is exactly where he was when the story began – sitting in an airport. In this sense, regardless of whether loser is the right word for him, Benji stays one. David, the mirror – awkward, jealous of his cousin’s charm – is instead the person who grows. He comes to realise two things. The first is that he should not question his own life too much – he has a family, he has his job. One of the final scenes has him coming home to that happy little world, in contrast to Benji’s continued loafing around at the airport. David, in other words, has a destination. The second thing that David realises is that he must do more to help Benji, but he cannot save him on his own. That is the significance both of his inviting Benji to come round for dinner in the closing moments – and of his acceptance of Benji’s decision to stay at the airport instead.

Whether you want to call these works stories about losers or use a more nuanced term, the fact remains that for all their humour and wit, the strugglers stay where they are. Benji doesn’t grow, and while Wilhelm might feel connected to the world and have demonstrated to the reader that he’s a decent chap, he still ends with no money left and little prospect of getting some besides selling his car. The narration in both works doesn’t try to save these people from themselves – perhaps the creators thought that would be cheap. Instead, it shows them to be complex, human, individuals through both their flaws and good qualities.

The growth is elsewhere. In Seize the Day, it is for the reader, seeing the bad cruel world surrounding Wilhelm; while in A Real Pain it’s mainly for David, who sees that he was not the loser after all.

Concluding Comments

Your blogger is neither very experienced at writing about film nor at doing comparisons like this. To be honest, it feels a disservice to works that are both individually worth reading and seeing to give them each half a post! For example, given both are, at least in the background (in the Bellow), about Jewishness, I haven’t given it nearly enough space as I perhaps should have.

Then, with Bellow, there’s the prose. Plenty of people have said Bellow has great prose, but I really noticed it here and would have loved to delve more into that. Here’s just one shockingly lovely sentence:

“Light as a locust, a helicopter bringing mail from Newark Airport to La Guardia sprang over the city in a long leap.”

It does nothing except make you swoon.

I also would have wanted to write more about Dr Tamkin, who is one of the funniest characters I have yet encountered in fiction. Again, the pleasure would be in letting him speak for himself, rather than actually talking about what he had to say. (Bellow comes the Nabokov school of anti-psychoanalysis, which quite frankly is not interesting to me at all, so long after people have stopped taking Freud seriously except in literature departments.)

Still, both works are fun and interesting, and I hope I’ve succeeded in commending them to you.

The Ghosts in Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary

I am haunted by the ghosts of lost worlds. In a sense, this is what all literature is about – taking us into the past or into another world altogether and making it real to us so that we can live in it and love it. But I do not mean that sense of lost worlds here. What I mean is the desolation, the empty space where a world once was. The world of religions in which most of us can no longer believe, or countries or spaces that no longer exist, like the Habsburg Monarchy or the Soviet Union, function in my life like ghosts. Driven by curiosity, I want to know them, but at the same time, they come to me, often against my wishes, like obsessions, to torture my mind. They gather me into conflicted mourning for what was lost.

Ukraine is a land of ghosts, and one of the greatest horrors of Russia’s invasion is that it promises the creation of more ghosts and more hauntings. When I awoke on the 24th of February last year and saw the first fires on Ukrainian soil, I was overwhelmed in a way that I didn’t think possible of myself with visions of emptiness. Empty houses, empty villages, emptied worlds.

Babel’s Ukraine

Many worlds have been lost in Ukraine. At least two of them we see in the work of Isaac Babel. The Soviet writer, a Jew from Odessa on the Ukrainian coast, described a world of gangsters and crime that seems more appropriate to America than anywhere this side of the Atlantic, in his Odessa Tales. But today I am writing about another world, the world of today’s West Ukraine, a land that at the time was the site of one of the Soviet Union’s first wars – in fact, a war before the Union really had that name at all – the Soviet-Polish War of 1919-1921.

Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, a short story cycle that is the most brilliant I have ever read, is his main work of the period. (You can read my translation of one story here). But even though it is written with plenty of cunning, and was successfully published in the USSR, it is still a work of evasiveness. Babel also kept a writer’s diary of the period, the 1920 Diary, and here he is much less equivocal about what he saw and what he experienced. Here, for readers, there is the terrible horror and curiosity of a world that is being annihilated before our eyes, a world that will be finished off some twenty years later with the invasion of the lands by German troops and later population transfers organised by Stalin.

Contested Identities – Babel and the Land

The 1920 Diary is a text about identity. In the contested land of today’s West Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus live Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Czechs. They speak languages ranging from German to Yiddish, Polish to Ukrainian and Russian, and practice a hodgepodge of faiths including traditional Catholicism, the Uniate faith, Eastern Orthodoxy, and of course Judaism. From town-to-town identity shifts in a way that seems scarcely believable today. But beyond this, there is Babel himself. We can read the diary, like we read the Red Army Cavalry Stories, as a site of struggle between Babel’s understandings of himself. In fact, due to its personal nature, the 1920 Diary is perhaps even better for this than the stories are.

But first, who was Babel? An Odessan Jew of course. Raised in Odessa – then the most cosmopolitan city of the Russian Empire – and briefly in Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), he was educated in Kiev (Kyiv), moved to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) where he met Gorky, who helped him establish himself as a writer. He seems to have been fluent in at least Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and French. He wrote a little, and used to joke that he was “the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence.” Silent or not, he managed to fall under the suspicion of the authorities and was executed under false charges by the authorities in 1940. Babel had several opportunities to emigrate from the Soviet Union, but he did not take them. Like Andrei Platonov, one element of Babel’s fascination to me lies in his attitude towards the USSR, mixing the love of its hopes and criticism of its realities.

Babel wrote primarily in Russian, but we know that some of his first stories were written in French. Like Nabokov, or Taras Shevchenko in Ukrainian literature, he was at ease not just reading, but even writing in multiple languages. The 1920 Diary is written in Russian (as was Shevchenko’s personal journal), but it is peppered with other languages, including the ever-popular refrain from the poor Ukrainians he meets: “nemae” – we have nothing left to give.

Was Babel a Jew, a Russian or perhaps even a Ukrainian, or rather a Soviet and a Communist? The 1920 Diary is a place where we can begin asking these questions.

If he refers to himself occasionally as Russian, there are certainly moments when he seems more comfortable with the Ukrainian cultural space. “Ha, what a gloomy life these Russians lead! Where is the Ukrainian mirth?” he asks at one point. His main allegiance, however, seems to be to Odessa and to the Jews. “An old Jew – I love talking with our people – they understand me,” he remarks, even as at other times he lapses into a more critical voice towards the “Yids”. He notes every town and city where he encounters the Jews and he notes the injustices of the rampaging armies towards them, from rapes to being forced to cook on the Sabbath. Besides this, it is Odessa that he longs for. “We spoke about Tiflis, fruit, sun. I think about Odessa, my soul is torn.” Whenever a character has some association with the city Babel seems to brighten.

Revolution and the Vanguard

The Red Army are in Poland to spread Communism. In the early days after 1917, it seemed as though the workers’ revolt could truly become international, and military might would help to spread it. At the time of the diary Babel is certainly a supporter of the Revolution – after all, he was accompanying the army as a propagandist – but we also see increasing uncertainties come into his voice as the war goes on and he sees what the Revolution means in practice. As he asks at one point, “We are the vanguard, but of what?” He believes that the poverty and rank destitution of many of the people he encounters can be improved under Soviet systems – “I am exasperated, I can’t contain my indignation: the dirt, the apathy, the hopelessness of Russian life are unbearable, the Revolution will do some good work here.” But he discovers that his understanding of the Revolution is not shared with the soldiers themselves.

The cavalry are predominantly Cossacks, in Babel’s case from the Kuban region in today’s Russia. At the time, before the Holodomor and related policies, the land was populated mostly by ethnic Ukrainians, and the Cossacks go around singing Ukrainian songs. “What kind of men are our Cossacks?” Babel asks of the people who are bringing Communism to the West. “Many-layered: rag-looting, bravado, professionalism, revolutionary ideals, savage cruelty. We are the vanguard, but of what? The population is waiting for liberators, the Jews for freedom—but who arrives? The Kuban Cossacks. . . .”

Babel wants to see the Revolution as progress. Marxism, after all, envisions the world as tending towards Communism and peace and prosperity for all. But he realises instead that history is much more cyclical than this. A few posts ago I wrote about Gogol’s novella of Cossack violence, Taras Bulba. There the Cossacks go on a rampage throughout Ukraine and Poland, murdering Jews and Catholics and everyone else. Babel sees much the same in his own day.

“An ancient church, the graves of Polish officers in the churchyard, fresh burial mounds, ten days old, white birch crosses, all this is terrible, the house of the Catholic priest has been destroyed, I find ancient books, precious Latin manuscripts. The priest, Tuzynkiewicz, I find a photograph of him, he is short and fat, he worked here for forty-five years, he lived in one place, a scholar, the assortment of books, many of them in Latin, editions of 1860, that was when Tuzynkiewicz lived.”

Babel meticulously notes each pogrom, each act of violence against the Jews.

“The Zhitomir pogrom carried out by the Poles, and then, of course, by the Cossacks.

After our vanguard units appeared, the Poles entered the town for three days, Jewish pogrom, cut off beards, they always do, rounded up forty-five Jews in the market, took them to the slaughterhouses, torture, they cut out tongues, wailing over the whole town square.”

“the same old story, the Jews have been plundered, their perplexity, they looked to the Soviet regime as saviors, then suddenly yells, whips, Yids. I am surrounded by a whole circle, I tell them about Wilson’s note, about the armies of labor, the Jews listen, sly and commiserating smiles,”

The betrayal of the Jews by the Soviets is something Babel is obviously upset by. He tries to console those he meets with words of the Revolution, but it becomes increasingly inauthentic as the diary goes on: “The husband: Will there be freedom to trade, to buy a few things and then sell them right away, no speculating? I tell him yes, there will, everything will be for the better— my usual system—in Russia wondrous things are happening: express trains, free food for children, theaters, the International.”

What is happening in the war is a repetition of the violence that had come again and again to the people of the region:

“The Jewish cemetery outside Malin, centuries old, the stones have toppled, almost all the same shape, oval at the top, the cemetery is overgrown with weeds, it saw Khmelnitsky, now Budyonny, the unfortunate Jewish population, everything repeats itself, once again the same story of Poles, Cossacks, Jews is repeating itself with striking exactness, what is new is Communism.”

Communism with the Cossacks? No, “they are simply an instrument the party is not above using.” Instead, Babel comes to see the war as violence and hate. “About the atamans, there had been many there, they got themselves machine guns, fought against Shkuro and Mamontov, merged into the Red Army, a heroic epic. This is not a Marxist Revolution, it is a Cossack uprising that wants to win all and lose nothing. Apanasenko’s hatred for the rich, an unquenchable hatred of the intelligentsia.” The Cossacks care nothing for the Revolution, and certainly nothing for the people Babel records them raping, butchering, and stealing from. But the Poles, too, are little better. The Jews time and again recount the double pogrom, as first the Poles, then the Ukrainian Cossacks, torture them. At one point we get a brief glimpse of the ghost of a better world, then see the present that has replaced it:

“I won’t forget this shtetl, covered courtyards, long, narrow, stinking, everything 100-200 years old, the townsfolk more robust than in other places, the main thing is the architecture, the white and watery blue little houses, the little backstreets, the synagogues, the peasant women. Life is almost back on track again. People had led a good life here— respected Jewry, rich Ukrainians, market fairs on Sundays, a specialized class of Russian artisans: tanners trading with Austria, contraband.

The Jews here are less fanatical, better dressed, heartier, they even seem more cheerful, the very old men in long coats, the old women, everything exudes the old days, tradition, the shtetl is saturated in the bloody history of the Polish Jewish ghetto. Hatred for the Poles is unanimous. They looted, tortured, scorched the pharmacists body with white-hot iron pokers, needles under his nails, tore out his hair, all because a Polish officer had been shot at—sheer idiocy! The Poles have gone out of their minds, they are destroying themselves.”

Loss

It is extraordinary that in a region where blood had only just dried from the First World War, people are so willing to spill it again. Babel notes that “more and more often we come across trenches from the last war, barbed wire everywhere, enough for fences for the next ten years, destroyed villages.” Rather than rebuilding, in poverty, the people are turning against each other. Even within the Red Army, as the war (which they ultimately lost) goes steadily worse, antisemitism increases: “Down with the Yids, save Russia!” As one soldier yells.

The Revolution, Babel realises, is not doing what it is supposed to. “I mourn the fate of the Revolution.” But an army cannot bring a revolution. Instead, “we are destroying, moving forward like a whirlwind, like lava, hated by all, life is being shattered to pieces, I am at a huge, never-ending service for the dead.” It is not Communism that they bring, but ghosts and fresh graves.

To read the 1920 Diary is to be surrounded by these ghosts. There is the Polish estate that the Cossacks loot, where Babel finds the books the owners in their hurry to leave were unable to take: “Extremely precious books in a chest, they didn’t have time to take them along: the constitution approved by the Sejm at the beginning of the eighteenth century, old folios from the times of Nicholas I, the Polish code of laws, precious bindings, Polish manuscripts of the sixteenth century, the writings of monks, old French novels.”

Babel, this most wonderful writer, lives and breathes culture. His joy at the Jewish celebrations, at the old churches and synagogues, is palpable. He sits and talks to a priest about the differences between Catholics and Uniates. He is curious about these differences, about all the peoples in the area. And as a “Russian” and a Jew, he has access to more areas than most.

The End of the Story

Yet Babel is out of place. In some twenty years this world, already aflame, will be ruined completely. The Ukrainian UPA, now celebrated as national heroes in that country, will collaborate with the occupying Nazi German government to slaughter as many as 100’000 men, women and children, Poles and Jews and any Ukrainians who dared intermarry or believe in Soviet ideals, in an act of terrible ethnic cleansing. The Poles retaliated with just as much force, to the delight of the occupying German forces who could leave the resistance to wear itself out on self-slaughter. As for the Jews, caught in the middle, they were systematically murdered even if they escaped the UPA and the Poles. A bit further East, Babel’s Odessa, with about 30% of its population Jewish, was more or less emptied of them and began a precipitous decline similar to that of Trieste, which I wrote about last year. Finally, Stalinist population transfers made West Ukraine unrecognisable, shunting Ukrainians and Poles and other ethnicities around so that the multiethnic, multicultural, world of the diary became just a dream. Lviv, today that most “Ukrainian” of cities, only became ethnically Ukrainian in this period. Before it, Lwów was mostly a home for Poles and Jews.

I came away from the 1920 Diary just so desperately sad. There was a world here, and human savagery ruined it. I despise the nationalists who have destroyed culture here and elsewhere, whether they be Ukrainian or Russian, British or German or French, they are all my enemies. Babel, the Jew from Odessa, writing in Russian, multilingual and ever curious, was a hero of literature and his time. This land, which has only recently become Ukraine, gave birth to some of the most extraordinary literary figures the world has known – Schulz, Babel, Gogol, Shevchenko, Bulgakov, Lispector – to name just a few of them. But as for the ghosts of writers stranded in today’s quite understandably nationalistic Ukraine but did not write in that language or belong to that culture, who now will tend to their graves? With a world of mixed language, mixed culture, mixed identity, safeguarding heritage can only be a communal, collective effort, and matters of culture must not be left in the hands of the nationalists, who cannot even successfully look after their own.  

The Lush Language of Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew, wrote a few stories in the 1930s and then was killed by the Gestapo after Germany took over Poland. It is upon these few stories which his legacy rests. They are stories of a little village on the Austro-Hungarian borderlands, of a strange father and a stranger world, and are at times comedic, at times serious, at times deathly sad. What makes them special – for after all there are quite a few central-European writers bemoaning life in the provinces at that time – is the way that Schulz writes. His language is infused with a kind of imaginative intensity, and every image, sound, or thought, is described without a cliché in sight, so that they hang in the mind long after we have finished reading.

In his obsession with language and his life’s tragic trajectory, Schulz is not unlike Isaac Babel. In his treatment of strangeness and absurdity, he has something of Kafka about him (he translated The Trial into Polish). And in his interest in the imagination and spaces, forbidden and mysterious, he often reminded me of Borges. But as a writer, for better or worse, he is clearly unique, entirely himself.

Stories

The world that Schulz describes is seen through a child’s eyes and endowed with the full imaginative potential that each child brings to the world. The stories he tells are not plot-driven. Instead, they are closer to paintings – they make us drink our fill of a particular impression or mood. When things happen, it’s almost always an afterthought. Take the story “Birds”. The narrator’s father decides to house a hundred exotic birds in one room of their home after becoming interested in ornithology. When he needs still more entertainment, he decides to cross breed them, creating new and more bizarre specimens. In his obsession, the father begins to become bird-like himself. But one day the cleaner comes and throws the birds out. This is the essence of the story.

It lasts four or five pages. What sustains it is its language, more than the plot. A phrase like this – “The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread” – is enough to make us stop, pause, wonder. The story also contains its fair share of ideas, but unlike say in the case of Musil, the language in Schulz seems more important than what it might be trying to say. There is a condor who urinates in the same chamber pot as the narrator’s father, an image that brings to mind a certain Austrian psychoanalyst. Then there is the matter of the father’s own ornithological transformation – a demonstration of how our obsessions take hold of us. The story ends, however, after the birds have been driven out, with the father coming downstairs – “A moment later, my father came downstairs – a broken man, an exiled king who had lost his throne and his kingdom”. The image is too ridiculous to be wholly serious, and this light-heartedness means that Schulz never gets too bogged-down in the cleverness of ideas.

Character

Character also goes some way to sustaining a cold, hard, plotless universe. In “August” we meet some of the narrator’s relatives. Here’s an example:

“Emil, the eldest of the cousins, with a fair moustache in a face from which life seemed to have washed away all expression, was walking up and down the room, his hands in the pockets of his voluminous trousers.”

I love this description because of the trousers. It almost seems that they are more characterful than Emil himself. When Schulz applies his wondrous language to people, he can make truly memorable descriptions. Emil’s storytelling is described thus: “he told curious stories, which at some point would suddenly stop, disintegrate, and blow away.”

Of an aging man, Uncle Charles, Schulz excellently conveys a kind of paranoia through his description of Charles’ environment: “The rooms, empty and neglected, did not approve of him, the furniture and the walls watched him in silent criticism.”

But the figure who is most striking is easily the narrator’s father. Unlike Kafka’s father, the father of Schulz’s story is a person more to be pitied than feared: “We heard him talk to God, as if begging for something or fighting against someone who made insistent claims and issued orders”. He is at one point compared to an Old Testament prophet, but in the act of throwing a chamber pot from a window, so that the comparison is just as embarrassing to us as it is to the narrator. At one point the father turns into a crab, at another he appears to be in the process of transforming into a cockroach. In a tragic reinterpretation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” the narrator, a child, begs his mother to tell him what has become of his father. She merely says that he is now a travelling salesman, and home rarely. But the truth is that like Gregor, he has become monstrous, a thing to be shunned. And this is not something that the narrator should discover. 

Imagination and Books

I wrote that Schulz shares with Borges a preoccupation with books and with magical spaces. In the longest story “Spring”, the narrator becomes engrossed in a stamp collection that comes to represent for him the key to understanding the world. In “The Book”, what appears to be an old catalogue is transfigured by the narrator’s nostalgia into being the source of all earthly joy. He looks everywhere for it, only to discover that the housemaid is using its pages for lighting fires. A paragraph like this, of which there are many similar examples, seems to make Schulz into a precursor to the great Argentine:

“An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its centre an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of its being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently”.

Schulz here is exploring the way that objects can be transformed by attention, and how they might disclose hidden meanings. Borges’s world too, is filled with magical objects – daggers, alephs, and the like. But what differentiates Schulz from Borges is that Schulz has more heart. The near destruction of the book for starting fires is a disaster, rather than a development in a story of ideas. The narrator’s emotions are felt by us, even though we retain a certain ironic distance (after all, we know that with age the narrator will realise that a catalogue is just a catalogue, and really not worth getting so excited about).

Magic Spaces

Beyond books, Schulz uses the imagination to transform his provincial town’s world into something far greater. One of my favourite stories is “Cinnamon Shops”, which sees the narrator go on a walk late at evening:

“It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that, because in its semi-obscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, makebelieve streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.”

With Schulz we never know when the real world ends and when the magical one begins. The narrator visits his school, but finds it transformed now that it is dark. He enters spaces he has never been before. He feels a certain anxiety, which Schulz conveys perfectly through his language:

“The profound stillness of these empty rooms was filled with the secret glances exchanged by mirrors and the panic of friezes running high along the walls and disappearing into the stucco of the white ceilings.”

Awe and wonderment are what makes these descriptions so compelling. Schulz has a particular talent for describing the sky, which always succeeds in making it ominous, or joyous, or frightening, as he desires.

Conclusion

His was a small oeuvre, but there’s no denying Schulz’s talent, which is why there are few valid reasons for avoiding him. Nevertheless, he is a writer who is better sampled in sips than gulps. My girlfriend, who bought me the collection, asked me to read the tales aloud to her. This was the right approach. Slowed down by my voice, the language could reach me with its full melodious complexity. I could not rush to find some plot – I could only enjoy what I had in front of me.

Schulz is a master of words. Even if his ideas are not as gripping as some other writers, or his plots as exciting, still he draws us in. Language, at least in his hands, is far more important than ideas or plots are in those of other writers, because Schulz uses language to transform the world. He reveals possibilities for vivid description which are obscured by the layers of cliché we normally read in books, and in doing so frees us from looking on the world as something finished, already described. Thanks to him we can see it as something magical once again.