The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz [3]
Schulz's Drogobych was a town in Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which more than a hundred years earlier had helped to eradicate Poland from the map of Europe. In this part of the conquered land Bruno Schulz—the youngest of three children, educated at home and in a school named after Emperor Francis Joseph—did not grow up in the dominant traditions of German-speaking Austria, nor did he remain in the sphere of traditional Jewish culture. The merchant profession to which his parents belonged separated them from the Hasidim, and he was never to learn the language of his ancestors. Bruno Schulz did know German fluently, but he wrote in Polish, the language nearest to him and most obedient to his pen.
When Poland regained independent statehood in 1918, Schulz was twenty-six years old and had had three years of study—discontinued just before the war—in architecture. He taught himself to draw and produced graphics, intending to gain proficiency in this field and make it his career. His work in fine arts gave evidence of considerable talent but enabled him only to obtain— and with difficulty, at that—the post of a drawing-master in a high school. His ideas for fiction date from the 1920s. They mark the beginning, with a delay of some years yet before his publishing debut, of the life of Schulz the writer, who was to find the duties of a teacher utterly repugnant, although that job furnished his sole means of support.
In the days crammed with lessons he devoted his free moments to conversing with friends about art—not with the local friends he met daily and who never even suspected him of literary aspirations, but with those distant correspondents living in other cities who were confidants of his dialogues on art. These epistolary conversations provided him for years with his only real spiritual contact with other people. For a long time he did not let anyone know of his literary efforts; it was only drawing and painting that he practiced openly, in full view of his friends, despite the obviously masochistic theme of many of his works. His first literary compositions he concealed in a drawer, sharing them with no one.
Lacking the courage to address readers, he tried at first to write for a reader, a recipient of his letters. When at last, around 1930, he found a partner for this exchange in the person of Deborah Vogel, a poet and doctor of philosophy who lived in Lvov, his letters—even then often masterpieces of the epistolary art—underwent a metamorphosis, becoming daring fragments of dazzling prose. His correspondent, greatly excited, urged him to continue. It was in this way, letter by letter, piece by piece, that The Street of Crocodiles came into being, a literary work enclosed a few pages at a time in envelopes and dropped into the mailbox. Surely no other work of belles-lettres has originated in so curious and, at the same time, so natural a manner. A few more years had to pass before—thanks to the support of the eminent novelist Zofia Nalkowska—the resistance of publishers to a work so innovative could be overcome and The Street of Crocodiles could appear in book form. So the book was made available to the public, although it had been conceived and executed with only one reader in mind, the addressee of the letters sent from Drogobych to Lvov. Writing in this way, Schulz could be wholly indifferent to the tastes of the literary coterie and the capricious demands of the official critics. He would experience their pressures later on, and more than once he claimed that they paralyzed him, changing the quiet immediacy of personal communication into work fraught with peril and addressed to the Unknown—and this for one to whom art was a confession of faith, faith in the demiurgic role of myth.
What is this Schulzian mythopoeia, this mythologizing of reality? On what was his artistic purpose to "mature into childhood" based? Childhood here is understood as the stage when each sensation is accompanied by an inventive act of the imagination, when