Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [2]
After the publication of his first book, Schulz's life as a teacher of drawing and handicrafts at the Drohobycz boys' college began gradually to expand and brighten. He gained friends in the literary world of Warsaw through the novelist Zofia Nalkowska, who was instrumental in the publication of Cinnamon Shops, and through Stainslaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, a great admirer of Schulz's prose and one who was also both artist and novelist, as well as a theatrical innovator of genius. Schulz could now supplement his income from teaching by contributing to literary weeklies in Warsaw and Lwow. He began devoting a great deal of time to correspondence (which has been meticulously traced and collected over the years since the end of the last war by Jerzy Ficowski). There were no more letters like those to Deborah Vogel (almost all lost) that spurred Schulz to literary pursuits before any of his work was published. The new letters concerned mostly his work and aspirations: endeavors to get wider recognition, to gain a public, and to have his books translated abroad. The recurrent theme in many of these letters is Schulz's obsession with time: the encroachment on it of the reality of his daily drudgery as a teacher contrasting with his dreams of a limitless quota of uninterrupted time that would provide a tabula rasa of pure, virgin hours.
It was not to be. Through the accident of his brother's premature death in 1936, Schulz's financial responsibilities grew: he found himself sole supporter of his widowed sister, her son and an aged cousin. His engagement to a Catholic woman, a relationship already plagued by religious complications, was broken off. His letters reveal ever more frequent bouts of depression, each one lasting for ever longer periods. Although Cinnamon Shops brought him a prize from the Polish Academy of Letters (a fact that enhanced his standing in Drohobycz: his school gave him the title of "professor," but no rise in salary!), Sanatorium failed to win the annual prize awarded by the Warsaw weekly Wiadomosci Literackie. With the help of friends in Poland and France and after much persuasion, Schulz did manage to travel to Paris during the summer of 1938. For three weeks he visited art galleries and discussed art and literature. This was already a time of foreboding: Nazi expansionist policies presented a threat to peace in central Europe. The Polish-German pact of 1939 intensified the spread of Nazi ideas in some sections of Polish society. When war broke out in September, 1939, Drohobycz was, for a time, occupied by the Russians. Schulz could still teach and was able to write, but this type of writing was too personal, loo introspective to be palatable in the harsh climate of war. He therefore reverted to painting and was earning his modest keep as an artist in his native city when, during the German advance into Soviet territory, it was occupied by the Nazis in the summer of 1941.
In the Jewish quarter of Drohobycz, on a certain "Black Thursday" in November, 1942, Schulz was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot in the street by a Gestapo officer who had a grudge against another Nazi, Schulz's temporary "protector" who liked his paintings. His body was buried by a Jewish friend in a cemetery which no longer exists.
Schulz's fate, as he had written in "Loneliness," was "to be a parasite of metaphors ... carried away by the first simile that comes along." This particular metaphor does him less than justice: his oeuvre has triumphantly survived. The sixties saw the publication of his work in German, France, Italy and Norway. Now, forty years after its publication in Polish, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is at last published in English in the United States. Schulz's dream of being read by a wider public has at last come true.
Celina Wieniewska
THE BOOK
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