An excerpt from Bruno Schulz’s “The Republic of Dreams”:
And here is a PDF of the “The Republic of Dreams” in its entirety— with a bit of annotation.
Map of Galacia, 1910.
Bruno Schulz and Józefina Szelińska.
The Henryk Sienkiewicza school in Drohobycz, where Jozefina was working from 1930-1934, when Bruno Schulz met her. The building is currently a private residence.
Spring came early in that year of 1933, when Bruno found himself fascinated by a 28 year old teacher at the local seminary. Her name was Józefina Szelińska—and she was equally fascinated. She agreed to pose for a portrait in pastel, a portrait that became the first in a series.
After spending the morning posing and drawing, the two would stroll through the meadows behind her parents' house, discussing literature, art, and poetry, and wandering into the birch forest to be alone. Józefina later described those meetings as "something miraculous . . . inimitable experiences, which so rarely occur in life. It was the sheer essence of poetry."
Józefina grew up in Janow, the daughter of Zygmunt and Helena Schranzel, a Jewish couple who converted to Catholicism. In 1919, she officially changed her name from Schranzel to the more Polish-sounding Szelińska.
Bruno referred to her as Juno, a nod towards the Roman goddess of marriage and fertility. Every person has an animal resemblance, Bruno explained, and hers was with the antelope. As for himself, he resembled the dog.
"The artist absorbed the human being in him," Józefina said of Bruno, whom she likened to a kobold, or "a mythological sprite neither boy nor man, alternately virtuous, and mischievous." This mixture of innocence and dangerous jouissance characterizes her thinking of him.
Schulz came to visit her almost every evening of that summer in 1933; they discovered a shared adoration of Rilke, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. She was the first ear to hear many of the stories Schulz read aloud to her.
When she lost her teaching job in 1934, Józefina moved to Warsaw, and the two began a relationship of correspondence, which she described as “passionate letters that saved Bruno from his depressions”, attenuated by short visits in winter and summer holidays.
Maria Kasprowiczowa, the widow of a poet named Jan, invited the couple to her villa near Zakopane. The correspondence between Bruno and Maria was only discovered in 1992, when a scholar was rummaging through Jan Kasprowiczowa’s archives. But this correspondence offers insight into Schulz’s thinking about his beloved during this time.
On 25 January 1934, Bruno wrote to Maria:
The word "human being" in itself is a brilliant fiction, concealing with a beautiful and reassuring lie those abysses and worlds, those undischarged universes, that individuals are. There is no human being there are only sovereign ways of being, infinitely distant from each other, that don't fit into any uniform formula, that cannot be reduced to a common denominator. From one human being to another is a leap greater than from a worm to the highest vertebrate. Moving from one face to another we must rethink and rebuild entirely, we must change all dimensions and postulates. None of the categories that applied when we were talking about one person remain when we stand before another.... When I meet a new person, all of my previous experiences, anticipations, and tactics prepared in advance become useless. Between me and each new person the world begins anew.
In January 1935, Schulz’s brother, Izydor Sculz, died young of a heart attack, leaving behind a daughter, sign, and a mother who relied on him for financial support. A few months later, Bruno and Josefina made their engagement public.
Józefina "enslaves me and obligates me," Shulz wrote to Maria of his betrothed:
My fiancée represents my participation in life; only by her mediation am I a human being and not just a lemur or a gnome. ... With her love, she has redeemed me, already nearly lost and marooned in a remote no-man's-land, a barren underworld of fantasy….Is it not a great thing to mean everything for someone?
When he was granted a six-month paid leave in January 1936, Schulz elected to spend most of it in Warsaw with his fiancée. The two attended a dinner there, in that month, where Józefina raved about living in Paris after the wedding. But Bruno stared at his plate, saying nothing. When asked where he'd like to live after their marriage, Bruno answered: "In Drohobycz." A crack had opened.
Another complication was the rising anti-Semitism in the borderlands. The nomenclature of bureaucracy required Schulz to encounter identity as construed by the state. As mentioned, although Józefina was born to two Jewish parents, she converted to Catholicism (the official Polish religion) along with them, and also Polonized her surname—-a fact which may have saved her life once the Nazis took over.
Neverthless, that February, Schulz published an announcement in local papers that formally acknowledged his “withdrawal from the Jewish community” (in Balint’s words). Rather than register himself as Catholic, the official Schulz declared himself a man “without denomination.”
In spring 1936, Josefina translated the first edition of Kafka’s The Trial into Polish. Although Bruno’s name was also listed on the cover as a translator, the majority of the translation work belonged to her. Bruno’s afterword located Kafka in a sort of universal mysticism whose ideas “are the common heritage of the mysticism of all times, and nations.” For Bruno, Kafka lifts the “realistic surface of existence” and sets it atop “his transcendental world” in a sort of “radically ironic, treacherous, profoundly ill-intentioned” grafting.
One could say that Bruno and Josefina wrote a book together, a book whose author was also Jewish, also an Austro-Hungarian who imagined life in relation to his entrepreneurial father. One can also wonder how Bruno’s reading of Kafka influenced the trajectory of his own relationship with Jozefina.
When Józefina begged him to live with her in Warsaw, Bruno refused, referencing his sister’s illness and the needs of his family. Later, Józefina said that he was haunted by an image of himself "as a beggar, wandering the city, reaching out his hands, and I would turn away from him contemptuously." Bruno often mentioned this image when discussions about money and cohabitation began.
By January 1937, Józefina despaired of his commitment. His indecision made her "the weaker party in the relationship," she said. For where "he had his creative world, his high regions," Józefina felt that she "had nothing". She celebrated her 32nd birthday quietly. A few days later, she poured a handful of sleeping pills into her mouth and swallowed them. Wavering along the edge of unconsciousness, tasting the nearness of death, Józefina cried out for help and was taken to the hospital.
After learning of his fiancee's averted suicide, Bruno rushed to Warsaw to be with her. While at the hospital, Bruno caught influenza and spent 10 days in bed, completely enfeebled. With Bruno being treated for influenza, Józefina went to recuperate at her parents' home, near the birch forest where she and Bruno had spent countless memorable afternoons.
In February, Bruno appeared at her parent’s house, carrying figs, dates, and flowers. He surrounded Józefina with tenderness and devotion. "He felt guilt," she wrote later, adding that the guilt was "completely unfounded, for he was nothing but goodness."
But a plant can be beautiful and transient; a gift horse can begin a war; a romance can mean everything and go nowhere. And if Bruno was goodness to his betrothed, but he was also indecisive, unreliable, wracked with self-doubt and insecurity.
In the spring of 1937, Józefina ended their engagement and forced herself to stop answering his correspondence.
Neither Bruno nor Józefina ever married. After Schulz's murder by a Nazi, Józefina spent the next 49 years in fidelity to his memory. "To stay with him, for better or worse, forever," she wrote. That is the story she insisted upon.
"Sous les Toits de Paris" and Joseph Roth.
As Esther Allen rightly observes, we have Joseph Roth’s books because of Michael Hofmann’s obsessive diligence as a translator. Or maybe, in his irredeemable complexity, Joseph Roth has us.
To be simultaneously vehement and committed to a neo-Romantic skepticism is not easy—-yet Roth managed it. His journalism and feuilletons on interwar Europe serve as glimpses into a past that could not predict the genocide in its future. Unlike other authors and scholars, Roth was difficult, which is to say, he refused to go along in order to get along with his peers.
Where, for example, Michel Leiris lionized the rituals of violence enacted by bullfights, Roth repeatedly editorialized against the inane cruelty of the sport. In a piece for Frankfurter Zeitung published on October 1, 1925, Roth describes the bullfight's role in placating the people of Nimes. (One can almost hear the Hermann Broch's Virgil groaning as he enters the emperor's festivities, and recognizes his pre-determined role in them.)
A young clownish fellow runs through the ring with a purple parasol, teasing the bull and performing for the audience, as Roth recounts:
Pursued by the bull, and shielded by the umbrella, he scrambles over the fence, and then, from his own cowardly safety, he jabs the umbrella into the bull's testicles. Huge laughter in the arena. The audience split their sides. The ugliest appurtenance invented by man becomes a weapon against the most appurtenance of the beast. The fellow couldn't have found a better expression of human dignity if he'd tried.
Once the bull is alone in the ring, Roth shifts into a supple act of identification with the tormented creature:
Bewildered, exhausted, foaming at the muzzle, the bull stops and faces the gate behind which, he knows, is the good, warm, protective shed, redolent of home. Oh, but the gate is shut and may never open again! The people are howling and laughing, and it seems that the bull has learned to distinguish between shouts intended to provoke him, and mere derision. A colossal contempt, bigger than the entire arena, fills the soul of the bull. Now he knows he is being laughed at. Now he no longer has the strength to be furious. Now he understands his helplessness. Now he has ceased to be an animal. Now he is the embodiment of all the martyrs of history. Now he looks like a mocked, beaten Jew from the East, now like a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, now like a gladiator torn to pieces, now like a tortured girl facing a medieval witch trial, and in his eyes there is a glimmer of that luminous pain that burned in the eye of Christ. The bull stands where he is and no longer hopes.
There is often this moment in which a vignette tilts towards embodied social critique in Roth’s nonfiction. He lures us in with details before holding a mirror to social behavior. But he doesn’t quite scold the reader. Nor does he moralize from a position of piety. He simply ambles along for another few paragraphs, providing a play-by-play of the bullfight, and then turns his pen to the spectators, the crowd watching the show, noting their impatience, their eagerness for action, the insatiable hunger that relies on its deniability:
The kindhearted, well-bred, polite citizens who take part in the game from a safe distance, by calling out fearlessly and brandishing heroic handkerchiefs, the tailors and hairdressers in their Sunday best—they are getting excited. Foam isn't enough for them anymore. They want to see blood, the good fellows!
Unable to fit into the crowd properly, Roth admits that he, like the “little white dog” belonging to a lady nearby, would prefer “to help” the bull. “But what can two poor pups like us do against five thousand people?” he asks, identifying himself with the dog rather than the humans present.
*
I’ve been thinking about Roth the critic . . . and the chimneys of Paris . . . and an essay Roth wrote about René Clair’s silent film, Sous les Toits de Paris (1930). . . and the way Clair, himself, described the origins of this film:
At the time I was shooting my second or third silent picture, I heard a circle of street singers in Paris, on my way home from the studios. I thought how sad it was that I had no sound with which to make a picture. Four years later, sound came, and I returned to my street-singers idea.
And about a comment Rene Clair made while shooting this film in May 1929—a concern about how the “monster” of sound might ruin cinema:
Can the talking picture be poetic? There is reason to fear that the precision of the verbal expression will drive poetry off the screen just as it drives off the atmosphere of the daydream. The imaginary words we used to put into the mouths of those silent beings in those dialogues of images will always be more beautiful than any actual sentences. The heroes of the screen spoke to the imagination with the complicity of silence. Tomorrow they will talk nonsense into our ears and we will be unable to shut it out.
The film’s original trailer is above—and the film is worth watching. In it, one can observe the techniques Clair developed to communicate those “imaginary words.”
For example, in the bar scene where the two male protagonists argue over Pola, the gramophone recording of Rossini's William Tell Overture starts to skip, creating an aura of sonic discord. Clair also shot the argument through a window, a technique that Sacha Guitry later borrowed to indicate unheard conversations.
“Through a process of mental collage…”
But I wanted to talk about Joseph Roth’s commentary on this comedy, which he ends in a note of wistful uncanniness. “This sound film has all the charm of perdition,” he writes, continuing:
Not one of those playing here will ever leave this world. They will fall further and further into it, sink into the hill of years that come rolling up unstoppably, smiling, to the song of the accordion. Melancholy will always be a sister to their joys. They will always drink, love, throw dice, steal. Their fate is implacable. That's what gives the film its sadness. But the implacableness has a sheen of mildness, which makes it seem, as it were, placable. That's why it's such a joyful film.
The repetition. The absence of words to lay claim to a certain heaviness—- a logistical complexity of interpretation. The further and further of falling into family where melancholy dines with joy. The gorgeous irresolute resolution of a line like: But the implacableness has a sheen of mildness, which makes it seem, as it were, placable.
If you’d like to read Roth’s entire piece, you can download a PDF copy below (which includes annotations for no reason whatsoever, unless one counts my amusement and pleasure).
*
Joseph Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise : Essays from France, 1925-1939, trans. Michael Hofmann and Katharina Ochse (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2003): 202-205. Roth’s essay was originally published in Frankfurter Zeitung on October 28, 1930.
“Under the Roofs of Paris” (1930) as directed by Rene Clair is available from Criterion as well as Criterion Channel.
